THE  NEGRO  QUESTION 


GEORGE  W.  CABLE'S  WRITINGS. 


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THE 


NEGRO  QUESTION- 


BY 


GEORGE  W.  CABLE 
AUTHOR  OF  "THE  SILENT  SOUTH 


NEW    YORK 

CHARLES   SCRIBNER'S   SONS 
1898 


COPYRIGHT,  1890,  by 
CHARLES  SCRIUNER'S  SONS. 


WM.  F.  FELL  &  CO. 

PHINTFRS, 
PHILADELPHIA. 


CONTENTS. 


PAGE 

THE  NEGRO  QUESTION, I 

THE  QUESTION — 

I.  Have  Colored  Americans  in  the  South  the  same 

Rights  as  Americans  of  Foreign  Birth,    ....  I 

II.  Color  Discrimination, 7 

III.  Inconsistencies, 16 

THE  ANSWER — 

I.  The  Social  Basis  of  Slavery  still  Exists,     ....  24 

II.  Enfranchisement  a  Cause  of  Apprehension,  ...  32 

III.  The  Freedmen  Loyal  to  Government, 39 

IV.  Distinction  Between  Civil  and  Social  Equality,     .  43 
V.  Responsibility  of  Southern  White  Men,      ....  47 

VI.  Material  Development  in  the  South, 51 

NATIONAL  AID  TO  SOUTHERN  SCHOOLS,  ...  59 

WHAT  SHALL  THE  NEGRO  DO? 66 

A  SIMPLER  SOUTHERN  QUESTION, 88 

WHAT  MAKES  THE  COLOR  LINE? no 

V 


93495 


VI  CONTENTS. 

PAGE 

THE   SOUTHERN  STRUGGLE   FOR   PURE  GOV 
ERNMENT 116 

I.  A  First  Necessity, 116 

II.  Does  the  Negro  Want  Pure  Government?   .    .    .123 

III.  Supposing  the  Negro  Unsuppressed, 128 

IV.  The  Policy  of  Pure  Government  First,    ....  133 
V.  The  Industrial  New  South, 139 

VI.  The  Reiga  of  the  One-Party  Idea, 146 

VII.  The  Inventions  of  Despair, 154 

VIII.  A  more  Excellent  Way, 162 


NOTE. 

The  following  pages  constitute  a  con 
tinuous  development  of  a  single  subject. 
The  divisions  of  the  work  appear  in  the 
form  of  separate  papers  only  because  of 
the  earlier  publication  of  most  of  them  as 

magazine  articles. 

G.  w.  CABLE. 


93495 


THE  NEGRO  QUESTION. 


THE  QUESTION. 

I. 

The  matter  that  is  made  the  subject  of  these 
pages  is  not  to-day  the  most  prominent,  but  itjs,,. 
tn.9  SI^Y^jB^AlUJSlicaaafiairs.  It  is  one  upon 
which,  of  late  years,  as  we  might  say,  much 
inattention  has  beerfcarefully  bestowed.  It  has 
become  a  dreaded  question.  We  are  not  politic 
ally  indolent.  We  are  dealing  courageously  with 
many  serious  problems.  We  admit  that  no  nation 
has  yet  so  shaken  wrong  and  oppression  from 
its  skirts  that  it  may  safely  and  honorably  sit 
down  in  a  state  of  mercantile  and  aesthetical 
pre-occupation.  4  And  yet  the  matter  that  gives 
us  daily  the  profoundest  unrest  goes  daily  by 
default.  /The  Nation's  bitter  experiences  wjth 
it  in  years  past,  the  baffling  complications  that) 
men  more  cunning  than  wise  have  woven  aroun< 
it,  its  proneness  to  swallow  up  all  other  question- 
and  the  eruptions  of  rancor  and  strife  that  atten< 
every  least  sign  of  its  spontaneous  re-opening| 


2  THE  NEGRO  QUESTION. 

have  made  it  such  a  weariness  and  offence  to  the 
great  majority,  and  especially  to  our  commercial 
impatience,  that  the  public  mind  in  large  part 
eagerly  accepts  the  dangerous  comfort  of  post 
ponement. 

What  is  this  question?  Superficially,  it  is  I 
whether  a  certain  seven  millions  of  the  people, 
one-ninth  of  the  whole,  dwelling  in  and  natives 
to  the  Southern  States  of  the  Union,  and  by  law 
an  undifferentiated  part  of  the  Nation,  have  or 
have  not  the  same  full  measure  of  the  American 
citizen's  rights  that  they  would  have  were  they 
entirely  of  European  instead  of  wholly  or  partly 
African  descent.  The  seven  millions  concerning 
whom  the  question  is  asked,  answer  as  with  one 
voice,  that  they  have  not.  Millions  in  the  North 
ern  States,  and  thousands  in  the  Southern,  of 
whites,  make  the  same  reply.  While  other  mil 
lions  of  whites,  in  North  and  South,  respond  not 
so  often  with  a  flat  contradiction  as  with  a  decla 
ration  far  more  disconcerting.  For  the  "  South 
erner  "  speaks  truly  when  he  retorts  that  nowhere 
in  the  entire  Union,  either  North  or  South,  are 
the  disadvantages  of  being  a  black,  or  partly 
black,  man  confined  entirely  to  the  relations  of 
domestic  life  and  private  society;  but  that  in 
every  part  there  is  a  portion,  at  least,  of  the  com-i 
munity  that  does  not  claim  for,  or  even  willingly 


THE  NEGRO  QUESTION.  3 

yield  to,  the  negro  the  whole  calendar  of  Amer-1 
lean  rights  in  the  same  far-reaching  amplitude] 
and  sacredness  that  they  do  for,  or  to,  the  whitei 
man.  The  Southern  white  man  points  to  thou 
sands  of  Northern  and  Western  factories,  count 
ing-rooms,  schools,  hotels,  churches  and  guilds, 
and  these  attest  the  truth  of  his  countercharge. 
Nowhere  in  the  United  States  is  there  a  whole 
community  from  which  the  black  man,  after  his 
physical,  mental  and  moral  character  have  been 
duly  weighed,  if  they  be  weighed  at  all,  is  not 
liable  to  suffer  an  unexplained  discount  for  mere 
color  and  race,  which  he  would  have  to  suffer 
publicly  in  no  other  country  of  the  enlightened 
world.  This  being  the  fact,  then,  in  varying  de 
grees  according  to  locality,  what  does  it  prove? 
Only  that  this  cannot  be  the  real  point  of  issue 
between  North  and  South,  and  that  this  super 
ficial  definition  is  not  the  true  one. 

Putting  aside  mere  differences  of  degree,  th< 
question  is  not,  Are  these  things  so?  but,  Ought* 
they  so  to  be?  To  this  a  large  majority  in  thej 
Northern  States  from  all  classes,  with  a  small 
minority  of  the  Southern  whites,  also  from  all 
ranks  of  life,  and  the  whole  seven  million  blacks, 
irrespective  of  party  leanings,  answer  No.  On 
the  other  hand,  a  large  majority  of  the  whites  in 
the  Southern  States — large  a&  to  th%  white  popu- 


4  THE  NEGRO  QUESTION. 

lation  of  those  States,  but  a  very  small  minority 
in  the  Nation  at  large — answer  a  vehement  "  Yes; 
these  things  should  and  shall  be  so." 

But  how  does  this  small  minority  maintain 
itself?  It  does  so  owing  to  the  familiar  fact  that, 
although  by  our  scheme  of  government  there  is 
a  constant  appeal  to  the  majority  of  the  whole 
people,  the  same  scheme  provides,  also,  for  the 
defence  of  local  interests  against  rash  actions  of 
national  majorities  by  a  parallel  counter-appeal 
(constantly  through  its  Senate  and  at  times  in 
other  ways)  to  the  majority,  not  of  the  people 
en  masse,  but  of  the  States  in  their  corporate 
capacity.  Now  a  very  large  minority  in  the 
Northern  States,  whose  own  private  declara 
tion  would  be  against  a  difference  between  white 
men's  rights  and  other  men's  rights,  nevertheless 
refuse  now,  as  they  refused  before  the  Civil  War/ 
to  answer  with  a  plain  yes  or  no,  but  maintain^ 
with  the  Southern  white-rule  party,  that  whether. 
these  things  ought  so  to  be  or  not  is  a  question  that 
every  State  must  be  allowed  to  ansiver  for,  and  to, 
itself  alone ;  thus  so  altering  the  voice  of  the 
Nation,  when  it  speaks  by  States,  as  virtually  to 
nullify  that  negative  answer  which  would  be 
given  by  a  majority  of  the  whole  people.  In  the 
Civil  Rights  bill  the  verdict  of  the  States  was 
once  given  against  all  race  discrimination  in  all 


THE  NEGRO  QUESTION.  5 

matters  of  public  rights  whatsoever,  and  for 
confining  it  within  that  true  domain — of  private 
choice — to  which  the  judgment  of  other  Chris 
tian  nations  consigns  it.  But  the  Civil  Rights 
bill,  never  practically  effective  in  the  communi 
ties  whose  upper  ranks  were  hostile  to  it,  has  at 
last  perished  in  the  inner  citadel  of  our  govern 
ment's  strong  conservatism,  the  national  Supreme 
Court,  and  the  Senate  majority  that  passed  the 
bill  was  long  ago  lost  by  revolutions  in  the 
Southern  States.  Thus,  by  a  fundamental  pro 
vision  in  the  National  Government,  intended  for 
the  very  purpose  of  protecting  the  weak  from 
the  strong,  a  small  national  minority  has  for 
twenty-five  years  been  enabled  to  withstand  the 
pressure  of  an  immense  majority. 

Whether  this  is  by  a  right  or  wrong  use  of  the» 
provision  is  part  of  the  open  question.  The  weak' 
are  protected  from  the  strong,  but  the  still  weaken 
are  delivered  into  the  hands  of  the  strong.  Seven 
millions  of  the  Nation,  mostly  poor,  ignorant  and 
degraded,  are  left  for  the  definition  and  enjoyment 
of  rights,  worth  more  than  safety  or  property,  to 
the  judgment  of  some  ten  other  millions  of  un 
questioned  intelligence  and  virtue,  but  whose 
intelligence  and  virtue  were  not  materially  less 
when,  with  a  courage  and  prowess  never  sur 
passed,  they  drenched  their  own  land  with  their 


6  THE  NEGRO  QUESTION. 

own   blood  to    keep    these    darker    millions    in 
slavery.    However,  be  it  a  use  or  an  abuse  of  the 
Nation's  scheme  of  order;  be  it  right  or  wrong 
this  is  politically  the  stronghold  of  the  conservad 
tive  party  in  the  Southern  States ;  and  it  is  mad( 
stronger  still,  steel-clad  and  turreted,  as  it  were,] 
with  the  tremendous  advantage  of  the  status  qua 
— that  established  order  of  things  which,  good 
or  bad,  until  it  becomes  intolerable  to  themselves,! 
men  will  never  attack  with  an  energy  equal  to 
that  with  which  it  is  defended. 

But  political  strength  is  little  by  itself.  The 
military  maxim,  that  no  defences  are  strong  with 
out  force  enough  in  them  to  occupy  their  line, 
is  true  of  civil  affairs.  Entrenchment  in  the  letter 
of  a  constitution  avails  little  with  the  people  at 
large  on  either  side  of  a  question,  unless  the  line 
of  that  entrenchment  is  occupied  by  a  living 
conviction  of  being  in  the  right.  The  most 
ultra-Southern  position  on  the  negro  question 
has  an  element  of  strength  close  akin  to  this. 
To  be  right  is  the  only  real  necessity ;  but  where 
is  the  community  that  will  not  make  and  defend 
with  treasure  and  blood  the  assumption  that  what 
is  necessary  is  right  ?  "  Southerners,"  in  the 
political  sense  of  the  term,  may  sometimes  lack 
a  clear,  firm-founded  belief  that  they  are  right ; 
they  may  have  no  more  than  a  restless  confidence 


THE  NEGRO  QUESTION.  *J 

that  others  are  as  wrong  as  they ;  but  they  haye 
at_least  a  profound  conivJrrHnn  that  they  are 
.moved  by  an  imminent  unremitting  ^imperative 
necessity.  Not  that  this  is  all;  hundreds  of 
thousands  of  them,  incapacitated  by  this  very 
conviction  from  falling  into  sympathy  with  the 
best  modern  thought,  have  been  taught,  and  are 
learning  and  teaching,  not  only  on  the  hustings, 
but  in  school,  in  college,  at  the  fireside,  through 
the  daily  press,  in  the  social  circle  and  in  church, ( 
that  in  their  attitude  on  the  negro  question  they/ 
are  legally,  morally  and  entirely  right. 

II. 

Now,  specifically,  what  are  these  things  that<^ 
the  majority  of  a  free  nation  says  ought  not  to 
be,  while  a  sectional  majority  triumphantly  main 
tains  they  must,  will,  ought  to  and  shall  be  ? 
Give  an  example  of  an  actual  grievance.  One 
commonly  esteemed  the  very  least  on  the  list  is 
this :  Suppose  a  man,  his  wife  and  their  child, 
decent  in  person,  dress  and  deportment,  but 
visibly  of  African  or  mixed  blood,  to  take  pass 
age  on  a  railway  train  from  some  city  of  the 
Eastern  States,  as  Boston,  or  of  the  Western,  as 
Chicago.  They  will  be  thrown  publicly  into 
company  with  many  others,  for  an  ordinary 
American  railway  passenger  coach  seats  fifty  per- 


8  THE  NEGRO  QUESTION. 

sons,  and  a  sleeping-car  accommodates  twenty- 
five  ;  and  they  will  receive  the  same  treatment 
from  railway  employes  and  passengers  as  if, 
being  otherwise  just  what  they  are,  they  were  of 
pure  European  descent.  Only  they  will  be  much 
less  likely  than  white  persons  to  seek,  or  be 
offered,  new  acquaintanceships.  Arriving  in  New 
York,  Philadelphia,  or  any  other  Northern  city, 
they  will  easily  find  accommodations  in  some 
hotel  of  such  grade  as  they  would  be  likely  to 
choose  if,  exactly  as  they  are,  they  were  white. 
They  may  chance  upon  a  house  that  will  refuse, 
on  account  of  their  color,  to  receive  them ;  but 
such  action,  if  made  known,  will  be  likely  to 
receive  a  wide  public  reprobation,  and  scant  ap 
plause  even  from  the  press  of  the  Southern 
States.  If  the  travelers  choose  to  continue  their 
journey  through  the  night,  they  will  be  free  to 
hire  and  occupy  berths  in  a  sleeping-car,  and  to 
use  all  its  accessories — basins,  towels,  pillows, 
etc. — without  the  least  chance  of  molestation  in 
act  or  speech  from  any  one  of  the  passengers  or 
employes,  let  such  passengers  or  employes 
from  any  State  of  the  Union,  Northern  01 
Southern. 

But,  on  reaching  the  Southern  States,  the  three 
travelers  will  find  themselves  at  every  turn  under] 
special  and  offensive  restrictions,  laid  upon  them 


THE  NEGRO  QUESTION.  9 

not  for  any  demerit  of  person,  dress  or  manners, 
but  solely  and  avowedly  on  account  of  thcj 
African  tincture  in  their  blood,  however  slight i 
that  may  be.  They  may  still  be  enjoying  the 
comforts  of  the  sleeping-car,  by  virtue  of  the 
ticket  bought  in  a  Northern  State  and  not  yet  fully 
redeemed.  But  they  will  find  that  while  in  one 
Southern  State  they  may  still  ride  in  an  ordinary 
first-class  railway  coach  without  hindrance,  in 
another  they  will  find  themselves  turned  away 
from  the  door  of  one  coach  and  required  to  limit 
themselves  to  another,  equal,  it  may  be,  to  the 
first  in  appointments,  and  inferior  only  in  the 
social  rank  of  its  occupants.  They  may  protest! 
that  in  America  there  are  no  public  distinctions! 
of  social  rank ;  but  this  will  avail  them  nothing.] 
They  may  object  that  the  passengers  in  the  car 
from  which  they  are  excluded  are  not  of  one,  but 
palpably  of  many  and  widely  different  social 
ranks,  and  that  in  the  car  to  which  they  are 
assigned  are  people  not  of  their  grade  only  but 
of  all  sorts ;  they  will  be  told  with  great  plain 
ness  that  there  is  but  one  kind  of  negro.  They 
will  be  told  that  they  are  assigned  equal  but  sepa 
rate  accommodation  because  the  presence  of  a 
person  of  wholly,  or  partly,  African  blood  in  the 
same  railway  car  on  terms  of  social  equality  with 
the  white  passengers  is  to  those  white  passengers 


10  THE  NEGRO  QUESTION. 

an  intolerable  offence ;  and  if  the  husband  and 
father  replies  that  it  is  itself  the  height  of  vul 
garity  to  raise  the  question  of  private  social  rank 
t  among  strangers  in  railway  cars,  he  will  be  for 
tunate  if  he  is  only  thrust  without  more  ado  into 
the  "colored  car,"  and  not  kicked  and  beaten  by 
two  or  three  white  men  whose  superior  gentility 
has  been  insulted,  and  he  and  his  wife  and  child 
put  off  at  the  next  station  to  appeal  in  vain  to 
the  courts.  For  in  court  he  will  find  that  rail 
way  companies  are  even  required  by  the  laws  of 
the  State  to  maintain  this  ignominious  separation 
of  all  who  betray  an  African  tincture,  refined  or 
unrefined,  clean  or  unclean,  from  the  presence 
of  the  white  passengers  in  the  first-class  cars,  be 
those  passengers  ever  so  promiscuous  a  throng. 
Such  is  an  example  of  one  of  the  least  griev 
ances  of  the  colored  man  under  the  present  re 
gime  in  the  Southern  States ;  and  so  dull  is  the 
common  perception  of  wrongs  committed  at  a 
distance,  that  hundreds  of  thousands  of  intelli 
gent,  generous,  sensitive  people  in  the  Northern 
States  are  daily  confessing  their  inability  to  see 
any  serious  hardship  in  such  a  case,  if  only  the 
"colored  car"  be  really  equal  in  its  appointments 
to  the  one  in  which  only  white  people  of  every 
sort  are  admitted;  as  if  a  permanent  ignominious 
distinction  on  account  of  ancestry,  made  in  pub- 


THE  NEGRO  QUESTION.  1 1 

lie,  by  strangers  and  in  the  enjoyment  of  com 
mon  public  rights  were  not  an  insult  or  an  injury 
unless  joined  to  some  bodily  discomfort. 

Let  it  be  plainly  understood  that  though  at  least 
scores  of  thousands  are  intelligent  and  genteel, 
yet  the  vast  majority  of  colored  people  in  the 
United  States  are  neither  refined  in  mind  nor  very 
decent  in  person.  Their  race  has  never  had  "a 
white  man's  chance."  In  America  it  has  been 
under  the  iron  yoke  of  a  slavery  that  allowed  no 
distinction  of  worth  to  cross  race  lines ;  and  in 
Africa  it  has  had  to  contend  for  the  mastery  of 
wild  nature  on  a  continent  so  unconquerable 
that  for  thousands  of  years  the  white  race  has 
striven  in  vain  to  subdue  it,  and  is  only  now  at 
last  strong  enough  to  pierce  it,  enriched,  en 
lightened  and  equipped  by  the  long  conquest 
of  two  others  less  impregnable.  For  all  that  is 
known  the  black  is  "an  inferior  race,"  though 
how,  or  how  permanently  inferior,  remains  un 
proved.  But  the  core  of  the  colored  man's1 
grievance  is  that  the  individual,  in  matters  of! 
right  that  do  not  justly  go  by  race,  is  treated 
whether  man  or  child,  without  regard  to  person^ 
dress,  behavior,  character  or  aspirations,  in  public 
and  by  law,  as  though  the  African  tincture,  much 
or  little,  were  itself  stupidity,  squalor  and  vice. 
But  let  us  see  whether  the  grievance  grows. 


12  THE  NEGRO  QUESTION. 

On  passing  into  a  third  Southern  State,  the 
three  travelers,  though  still  holders  of  first-class 
tickets,  will  be  required  to  confine  themselves  to 
the  so-called  second-class  car,  a  place  never 
much  better  than  a  dram  shop.  When  the 
train  stops  for  meals,  and  the  passengers,  men, 
women  and  children,  the  rough,  the  polished,  all 
throng  into  one  common  eating-room  to  receive 
a  common  fare  and  attention,  those  three  must 
eat  in  the  kitchen  or  go  hungry.  Nor  can  they 
even  await  the  coming  of  a  train,  in  some  rail 
way  stations,  except  in  a  separate  "  colored 
room."  If  they  tarry  in  some  Southern  city 
they  will  encounter  the  most  ^iarassing  and 
whimsical  treatment  of  their  mqjpfordinary  pub 
lic  rights  as  American  citizens.  "  They  may  ride 
in  any  street  car,  however  crowded,  seated  be 
side,  or  even  crammed  in  among,  white  men  6r 
women  of  any,  or  every,  station  of  life ;  but  at 
the  platform  of  the  railway  train,  or  at  the 
threshold  of  any  theatre,  or  concert,  or  lecture 
hall,  they  will  be  directed  to  the  most  undesir 
able  part  of  the  house,  and  compelled  to  take 
that  or  nothing.  They  will  find  that  the  word 
"  public "  rarely  means  public  to  them ;  that 
they  may  not  even  draw  books  from  the  public 
libraries  or  use  their  reading  rooms. 

Should  the  harried  and  exasperated  man  be 


THE  NEGRO  QUESTION.  13 

so  fierce  or  indiscreet  as  to  quarrel  with,  and 
strike,  some  white  man,  he  will  stand  several 
chances  to  a  white  man's  one  of  being  killed  on 
the  spot.  If  neither  killed  nor  half-killed,  but 
brought  into  court,  he  will  have  ninety-nine 
chances  in  a  hundred  of  confronting  a  jury  from 
which,  either  by,  or  else  in  spite  of,  legal  pro 
vision,  men  of  African  tincture  have  been  wholly 
or  almost  wholly  excluded.  If  sent  to  prison  he 
must  come  under  a  penal  system  which  the  re 
port  of  the  National  Commissioner  of  Prisons 
officially  pronounces  "  a  blot  upon  civilization." 
He  will  find  the  population  of  the  State  prisons 
often  nine-tenths  colored,  divided  into  chain- 
gangs,  farmed  out  to  private  hands,  even  sub 
leased,  and  worked  in  the  mines,  quarries,  in 
railway  construction  and  on  turnpikes,  under 
cordons  of  Winchester  rifles;  veritable  quarry 
slaves.  He  will  find  most  of  the  few  white  con 
victs  under  this  system  suffering  the  same  out 
rages  ;  but  he  will  also  find  that  the  system  itself 
disappears  wherever  this  general  attitude  toward 
the  black  race  disappears,  and  that  where  it  and 
its  outrages  continue,  the  race  line  in  prison  is 
obliterated  only  when  the  criminal  becomes  a 
negotiable  commodity  and  it  costs  the  lessee 
money  to  maintain  the  absurd  distinction.  He' 
would  find  the  number  of  colored  men  within 


14  THE  NEGRO  QUESTION. 

those  deadly  cordons  out  of  all  proportion  to 
the  colored  population  outside,  as  compared  with 
the  percentages  of  blacks  in  and  out  of  prison  in 
States  not  under  this  regime.  There  are  State 
prisons  in  which  he  would  find  the  colored  con-' 
victs  serving  sentences  whose  average  is  nearly 
twice  that  of  the  white  convicts  in  the  same 
places  for  the  same  crimes.  In  the  same  or 
other  prisons  he  would  find  colored  youths 
and  boys  by  scores,  almost  by  hundreds,  con 
sorting  with  older  criminals,  and  under  sentences 
of  seven,  ten,  twenty  years,  while  the  State  Leg 
islatures  vote  down  year  after  year  the  efforts  of 
a  few  courageous  and  humane  men  either  to 
establish  reformatories  for  colored  youth,  or  to 
introduce  the  element  of  reform  into  their  so- 
called  penitentiaries. 

But  suppose  he  commits  no  offence  against 
person  or  property ;  he  will  make  another  list  of 
discoveries.  He  will  find  that  no  select  school, 
under  "  Southern "  auspices,  will  receive  his 
child.  That  if  he  sends  the  child  to  a  public 
school,  it  must  be,  as  required  by  law,  to  a  school 
exclusively  for  colored  children,  even  if  his  child 
is  seven  times  more  white  than  colored.  Though 
his  child  be  gentle,  well-behaved,  cleanly  and 
decorously  dressed,  and  the  colored  school  so 
situated  as  to  be  naturally  and  properly  the 


THE  NEGRO  QUESTION.  1 5 

choice  of  the  veriest  riff-raff  of  the  school  popu 
lation,  he  will  have  no  more  liberty  than  before; 
he  will  be  told  again,  "  We  know  but  one  kind 
of  negro."  The  child's  father  and  mother  may 
themselves  be  professional  instructors ;  but  how 
ever  highly  trained ;  of  whatever  reputation  for 
moral  and  religious  character ;  however  talented 
as  teachers  or  disciplinarians;  holding  the  di 
ploma  of  whatever  college  or  university,  Welles- 
ley,  Vassar,  Yale,  Cornell ;  and  of  whatever  age 
or  experience,  they  will  find  themselves  shut  out 
by  law  from  becoming  teachers  in  any  public 
school  for  white  children,  whether  belonging  to, 
and  filled  from,  the  "  best  neighborhood,"  or  in, 
and  for,  the  lowest  quarter  of  alleys  and  shanties. 
They  will  presently  learn  that  in  many  hundreds 
of  Southern  school-districts  where  the  popula 
tions  are  too  sparse  and  poor  to  admit  of  sepa 
rate  schools  for  the  two  races,  the  children  of 
both  are  being  brought  up  in  ignorance  of  the 
very  alphabet  rather  than  let  them  enjoy  a  com 
mon  public  right  under  a  common  roof.  They 
will  find  that  this  separation  is  not  really  based 
on  any  incapacity  of  children  to  distinguish  be 
tween  public  and  private  social  relations;  but 
that  the  same  separation  is  enforced  among 
adults ;  and  that  while  every  Southern  State  is 


1 6  THE  NEGRO  QUESTION. 

lamenting  its  inability  to  make  anything  like  an 
adequate  outlay  for  public  education,  and  hun 
dreds  of  thousands  of  colored  children  are  grow.- 
ing  up  in  absolute  illiteracy  largely  for  lack  of 
teachers  and  school-houses,  an  expensive  isola 
tion  of  race  from  race  is  kept  up  even  in  the 
normal  schools  and  teachers'  institutes.  Ever 
in  the  house  of  worship  and  the  divinity  schoo 
they  would  find  themselves  pursued  by  the  same 
invidious  distinctions  and  separations  that  hac 
followed  them  at  every  step,  and  would  follow 
and  attend  them  still  to,  and  in,  the  very  alms- 
house  and  insane  asylum. 


m. 

And  then  they  would  make  one  more  discov 
ery.  They  would  find  that  not  only  were  they 
victims  of  bolder  infractions  of  the  most  obvious 
common  rights  of  humanity  than  are  offered  to 
any  people  elsewhere  in  Christendom,  save  only 
the  Chinaman  in  the  far  West,  but  that  to  make 
the  oppression  more  exasperating  still,  there  is 
not  a  single  feature  of  it  in  any  one  State,  though 
justifiable  on  the  plea  of  stern  necessity,  that 
does  not  stand  condemned  by  its  absence,  under^ 
the  same  or  yet  more  pronounced  conditions,  in  L 


THE  NEGRO  QUESTION.  \J 

some  other  State.  Sometimes  even  one  part  of/ 
a  State  will  utterly  stultify  the  attitude  held  in 
another  part.  In  Virginia  or  South  Carolina  a 
colored  person  of  decent  appearance  or  beha 
vior  may  sit  in  any  first-class  railway  car,  but 
in  Georgia  the  law  forbids  it,  and  in  Kentucky 
the  law  leaves  him  to  the  caprice  of  railway  man 
agements,  some  of  which  accord  and  others  with 
hold  the  right.  In  some  States  he  is  allowed  in 
the  jury  box,  in  some  he  is  kept  out  by  the  letter 
of  statutes,  and  in  some  by  evasion  of  them ; 
while  in  Tennessee  some  counties  admit  him  to 
jury  duty  and  others  exclude  him  from  it.  In 
one  or  two  Southern  cities,  the  teachers  in  col 
ored  public  schools  must  be  white.  In  certain 
others  they  must  be  colored ;  and  in  still  others 
they  may  be  either.  In  Louisiana  certain  rail 
way  trains  and  steamboats  run  side  by  side, 
within  a  mile  of  one  another,  where  in  the  trains 
a  negro  or  mulatto  may  sit  where  he  will,  and  on 
the  boats  he  must  confine  himself  to  a  separate 
quarter  called  the  "  freedman's  bureau." 

The  Civil  Rights  bill  was  fought  for  years  and 
finally  destroyed,  with  the  plea  that  it  infringed 
the  right  of  common  carriers  and  entertainers  to 
use  their  own  best  judgment  in  distributing  their 
passengers  and  guests  with  an  equitable  consid 
eration  for  the  comfort  of  all.  In  fact,  it  only 
3 


1 8  THE  NEGRO  QUESTION. 

forbade  distributions  that,  so  far  from  consulting 
the  common  comfort,  humor  the  demand  of  one 
crudely  self-assorted  private  social  class  for  an 
invariable,  ignominious  isolation  or  exclusion 
of  another.  Yet  the  same  States  and  persons 
who  so  effectually  made  this  plea,  either  allow 
and  encourage  its  use  as  a  cover  for  this  tyran 
nous  inequity,  or  else  themselves  ignore  their 
own  plea,  usurp  the  judgment  of  common  car 
riers  and  entertainers,  and  force  them  by  law 
to  make  this  race  distribution,  whether  they  deem 
it  best  or  not. 

And  yet  again,  all  over  the  South  there  are 
scattered  colleges,  academies  and  tributary  gram 
mar  schools,  established  and  maintained  at  the 
expense  of  individuals  and  societies  in  the  North 
ern  States,  for  the  education,  at  low  rates  of  tui 
tion  and  living,  of  the  aspiring  poor,  without 
hindrance  as  to  race  or  sex.  For  more  than 
twenty  years  these  establishments  have  flourished 
and  been  a  boon  to  the  African-American,  as  well 
as  to  the  almost  equally  noted  "  poor  whites  "  of 
the  Southern  mountain  regions,  sandhills  and 
"  pauper  counties,"  and  through  both  these  classes 
to  the  ultra-Southern  white  man  of  the  towns  and 
plantations — a  boon  the  national  value  of  which 
neither  he  nor  one  in  a  thousand  of  its  hundreds 
of  thousands  of  Northern  supporters  has  an  ade- 


THE  NEGRO  QUESTION.  19 

quate  conception,  else  these  establishments  would 
receive  seven  times  their  present  pecuniary  sup 
port.  These  institutions  have  graduated  some 
hundreds  of  colored  students  as  physicians  and 
lawyers.  At  one  time  lately  they  had  more  than 
eight  hundred  divinity  students,  nearly  all  of 
them  colored.  Their  pupils  of  all  grades  aggre 
gate  over  seventeen  thousand,  and  the  sixteen 
thousand  colored  teachers  in  the  public  schools 
of  the  South  have  come  almost  entirely  from 
them.  But  now  in  these  institutions  there  is  a 
complete  ignoring  of  those  race  distinctions  in 
the  enjoyment  of  common  public  rights  so  relig 
iously  enforced  on  every  side  beyond  their  bor 
ders  ;  and  yet  none  of  those  unnamable  disasters 
have  come  to  or  from  them  which  the  advocates 
of  these  onerous  public  distinctions  and  separa 
tions  predict  and  dread.  On  scores  of  Southern 
hilltops  these  schools  stand  out  almost  totally 
without  companions  or  competitors  in  their  pecu 
liar  field,  so  many  refutations,  visible  and  com 
plete,  of  the  idea  that  any  interest  requires  the 
colored  American  citizen  to  be  limited  in  any  of 
the  civil  rights  that  would  be  his  without  ques 
tion  if  the  same  man  were  white.  Virtually,  the 
whole  guild  of  educators  in  the  Southern  States, 
from  once  regarding  these  institutions  with  un 
qualified  condemnation  and  enmity,  are  now 


20  THE  NEGRO  QUESTION. 

becoming  their  friends  and,  in  some  notable 
cases,  their  converts.  So  widely  have  the  larger 
colleges  demonstrated  their  unique  beneficence 
that  in  some  cases  Southern  State  Governments, 
actively  hostile  to  the  privileges  of  civil  liberty 
they  teach  and  apply,  are  making  small  annual  ap 
propriations  in  contribution  toward  their  support. 

So  bristling  with  inconsistencies,  good  and 
bad,  would  our  three  travelers  find  this  tyran 
nous  and  utterly  unrepublican  regime.  Nowhere* 
else  in  enlightened  lands  and  in  this  day  do  so 
many  millions  see  their  own  fellow-citizens  so 
play  football  with  their  simplest  public  rights ;  for 
the  larger  part  of  the  Southern  white  people  do 
with  these  laws  of  their  own  making  what  they 
please,  keeping  or  breaking  them  as  convenient. 

But  their  discoveries  would  still  go  on.  They 
would  hear  these  oppressions  justified  by  South 
ern  white  people  of  the  highest  standing,  and 
— more's  the  shame — by  Northern  tourists  in 
the  South,  on  the  ground  that  the  people  upon 
whom  they  are  laid  are  a  dull,  vicious,  unclean 
race,  contact  with  which  would  be  physically, 
intellectually  and  morally  offensive  and  mis 
chievous  to  a  higher  race.  And  when  they 
might  ask  why  the  lines  of  limited  rights  are  not 
drawn  around  the  conspicuously  dull,  vicious 
and  unclean  of  both  races  for  the  protection  of 


THE  NEGRO  QUESTION.  21 

the  opposite  sort  in  both,  they  would  come  face 
to  face  upon  the  amazing  assumption  that  the 
lowest  white  man  is  somehow  a  little  too  good 
for  even  so  much  contact  with  the  highest  black, 
as  may  be  necessary  for  a  common  enjoyment  o 
public  rights  ;  and,  therefore,  that  no  excellence 
moral,  mental  or  physical,  inborn  or   attainec 
can  buy  for  a  "  man  of  color  "  from  these  sepa 
rationists  any  distinction  between  the  restriction 
of  his  civil  liberty  and  those   of  the  stupides 
and  squalidest  of  his  race,  or  bring  him  one  stq 
nearer  to  the  enjoyment  of  the  rights  of  a  whit 
man ;  or,  if  at  all,  then  only  as  a  matter  of  th 
white  man's  voluntary  condescension  and  wit] 


' 


the  right  disguised  as  a  personal  privilege.  1  They 
would  find  that  the  race  line  is  not  a  line  of 
physical,  moral  or  intellectual  excellence  at  all. 
Stranger  yet,  they  would  learn  that  no  propor 
tion  of  white  men's  blood  in  their  own  veins, 
unless  it  washes  out  the  very  memory  of  their 
African  tincture,  can  get  them  abatement  of  those 
deprivations  decreed  for  a  dull,  vicious  and  un 
clean  race,  but  that — men,  women  and  children 
alike — hundreds  and  thousands  of  mixed  race 
are  thus  daily  and  publicly  punished  by  their 
brothers  for  the  sins  of  their  fathers.  They 
would  find  the  race  line  not  a  race  line  at  all. 
They  would  find  that  the  mere  contact  of  race 


22  THE  NEGRO  QUESTION. 

with  race  is  not  the  matter  objected  to,  but  only 
any  and  every  sort  of  contact  on  an  equal  foot 
ing.  They  would  find  that  what  no  money,  no 
fame,  no  personal  excellence  and  no  fractional 
preponderance  of  European  blood  can  buy,  can 
nevertheless  be  bought  instantly  and  without 
one  of  these  things  by  the  simple  surrender  of 
the  attitude  of  public  equality.  They  would 
find  that  the  entire  essence  of  the  offence,  any 
and  everywhere  where  the  race  line  is  insisted 
on,  is  the  apparition  of  the  colored  man  or 
__woman  as  his  or  her  own  master ;  that  master- 
hood  is  all  that  all  this  tyranny  is  intended  to  pre 
serve,  and  that  the  moment  the  relation  of  master 
and  servant  is  visibly  established  between  race 
and  race  there  is  the  hush  of  peace. 

r^"What  is  that  negro — what  is  that  mulat- 
tress — doing  in  here  ?"  asks  one  private  indi 
vidual  of  another  in  some  public  place,  and  the 
other  replies : — 
"  That's  nothing ;  he  is  the  servant  of  that 
white  man  just  behind  him;  she  is  the  nurse  of 
those  children  in  front  of  her." 

"  Oh,  all  right."  And  the  "  cordial  relation" 
is  restored.  Such  conversation,  or  equivalent 
soliloquy,  occurs  in  the  South  a  hundred  times 
a  day. 

The  surrender  of  this  one  point  by  the  colored 


THE  NEGRO  QUESTION.  2$ 

man  or  woman  buys  more  than  peace — it  buys  •< 
amity ;  an  amity  clouded  only  by  a  slight  but 
distinct  and  constant  air  and  tone  of  command 
on  the  one  part,  a  very  gross  and  imperfect 
attitude  of  deference  on  the  other,  and  the  per 
petual  unrest  that  always  accompanies  forcible 
possession  of  anything.  But  since  no  people 
ever  compelled  another  to  pay  too  much  for 
peace  without  somehow  paying  too  much  for  it 
themselves,  the  master-caste  tolerates,  with  un 
surpassed  supineness  and  unconsciousness,  a 
more  indolent,  inefficient,  slovenly,  unclean, 
untrustworthy,  ill-mannered,  noisy,  disrespect 
ful,  disputatious,  and  yet  servile  domestic  and! 
public  menial  service  than  is  tolerated  by  any 
other  enlightened  people.  Such  is  but  one  of 
the  smallest  of  many  payments  which  an  intel 
ligent  and  refined  community  has  to  make  for 
maintaining  the  lines  of  master  and  servant-hood 
on  caste  instead  of  on  individual  ambition  and 
capacity,  and  for  the  forcible  equalization  of  mil 
lions  of  unequal  individuals  under  one  common 
public  disdain.  Other  and  greater  payments  and 
losses  there  are,  moral,  political,  industrial,  com 
mercial,  as  we  shall  see  when  we  turn,  as  now 
we  must,  to  the  other  half  of  this  task,  and 
answer  the  two  impatient  questions  that  jostle 
each  other  for  precedence  as  they  spring  from 


24  THE  NEGRO  QUESTION. 

this  still  incomplete  statement  of  the  condition 
of  affairs. 

The  two  questions  are  these :  If  the  case  is  so 
plain,  then,  in  the  first  place,  how  can  the  mil 
lions  of  intelligent  and  virtuous  white  people  of 
the  South  make  such  a  political,  not  to  say  such 
a  moral,  mistake  ?  And,  in  the  second  place,- 
how  can  the  overwhelming  millions  of  the  North, 
after  spending  the  frightful  costs  they  spent  in 
the  war  of  '61—  '65,  tolerate  this  emasculation  of 
the  American  freedom  which  that  war  is  sup 
posed  to  have  secured  to  all  alike  ? 


THE  ANSWER. 
I. 

As  to  the  Southern  people  the  answer  is  that,/ 
although  the  Southern  master-class  now  cordi-j 
ally  and  unanimously  admit  the  folly  of  slave-1 
holding,  yet  the  fundamental  article  of  political^ 
faith  on  which  slavery  rested  has  not  been  dis-  \ 
placed.      As  to  the   people   of  the    North  the  1 
answer  is  simpler  still :  the  Union  is  saved. 

The  Northern  cause  in  our  civil  war  was  not 
primarily  the  abolition  of  slavery,  although 
many  a  Northern  soldier  and  captain  fought 


THE  NEGRO  QUESTION.  2$ 

mainly  for  this  and  cared  for  no  other  issue 
while  this  remained.  The  Southern  cause  was 
not  merely  for  disunion,  though  many  a  South 
ern  soldier  and  captain  would  never  have  taken 
up  the  sword  to  defend  slave-holding  stripped  of 
the  disguise  of  State  sovereignty.  The  Northern 
cause  was  preeminently  the  National  unity. 
Emancipation — the  emancipation  of  the  negroes 
— was  -not  what  the  North  fought  for,  but  only 
what  it  fought  with.  The  right  to  secede  was 
not  what  the  South  fought  for,  but  only  what  it 
fought  with.  The  great  majority  of  the  Southern 
white  people  loved  the  Union,  and  consented  to 
its  destruction  only  when  there  seemed  to  be  no 
other  way  to  save  slavery ;  the  great  bulk  of  the 
North  consented  to  destroy  slavery  only  when 
there  seemed  no  other  way  to  save  the  Union. 
To  put  in  peril  the  Union  on  one  side  and 
slavery  on  the  other  was  enough,  when  nothing 
else  was  enough,  to  drench  one  of  the  greatest 
and  happiest  lands  on  earth  with  the  blood  of 
hundreds  of  thousands  of  her  own  children. 
Now,  what  thing  of  supreme  value  rested  on 
this  Union,  and  what  on  this  slavery,  that  they 
should  have  been  defended  at  such  cost  ?  There 
rested  on,  or  more  truly  there  underlay,  each  a 
fundamental  principle,  conceived  to  be  absolutely 
essential  to  the  safety,  order,  peace,  fortune  and 


26  THE  NEGRO  QUESTION. 

honor  of  society ;  and  these  two  principles  were 
antagonistic. 

They  were  more  than  antagonistic  ;  they  were 
antipodal  and  irreconcilable.  No  people  that 
hold  either  of  these  ideas  as  cardinal  in  their 
political  creed  will  ever  allow  the  other  to  be 
forced  upon  them  from  without  so  long  as  blood 
and  lives  will  buy  deliverance.  Both  were 
brought  from  the  mother  country  when  Amer 
ica  was  originally  colonized,  and  both  have  their 
advocates  in  greater  or  less  number  in  the  North 
ern  States,  in  the  Southern,  and  wherever  there 
is  any  freedom  of  thought  and  speech. 

The  common  subject  of  the  two  is  the  great 
lower  mass  of  society.  The  leading  thought  of 
/  the  one  is  that  mass's  elevation,  of  the  other  its 
subjugation.  The  one  declares  the  only  perma 
nent  safety  of  public  society,  and  its  highest  de 
velopment,  to  require  the  constant  elevation  of 
the  lower,  and  thus  of  the  whole  mass,  by  the 
free  self-government  of  all  under  one  common 
code  of  equal  civil  rights.  It  came  from  Eng 
land,  but  it  was  practically,  successfully,  benefi 
cently  applied  on  a  national  scale  first  in  the 
United  States,  and  Americans  claim  the  right  to 
call  it,  and  it  preeminently,  the  American  idea, 
promulgated  and  established,  not  by  Northerners 
or  Southerners,  one  greatly  more  than  another, 


THE  NEGRO  QUESTION.  2  7 

but  by  the  unsectional  majority  of  a  whole  new 
Nation  born  of  the  idea.  The  other  principle 
declares  public  safety  and  highest  development 
to  require  the  subjugation  of  the  lower  mass 
under  the  arbitrary  protective  supremacy  of  an 
untitled  but  hereditary  privileged  class,  a  civil 
caste.  Not,  as  it  is  commonly  miscalled,  an  aris 
tocracy,  for  within  one  race  it  takes  in  all  ranks 
of  society  ;  not  an  aristocracy,  for  an  aristocracy 
exists,  presumably,  at  least,  with  the  wide  con-  \ 
sent  of  all  classes,  and  men  in  any  rank  of  life 
may  have  some  hope  to  attain  to  it  by  extraor 
dinary  merit  and  service ;  but  a  caste ;  not  the 
embodiment  of  a  modern  European  idea,  but  the 
resuscitation  of  an  ancient  Asiatic  one. 

That  one  of  these  irreconcilable  ideas  should 
by-and-by  become  all-dominant  in  the  formation 
of  public  society  in  one  region,  and  its  opposite 
in  the  other  region,  is  due  to  original  differences 
in  the  conditions  under  which  the  colonies  were 
settled.  In  the  South,  the  corner-stone  of  the 
social  structure  was  made  the  plantation  idea — 
wide  lands,  an  accomplished  few,  and  their  rapid 
aggrandizement  by  the  fostering  oversight  and 
employment  of  an  unskilled  many.  In  the 
North,  it  was  the  village  and  town  idea — the 
notion  of  farm  and  factory,  skilled  labor,  an 
intelligent  many,  and  ultimate  wealth  through  an 


28  THE  NEGRO  QUESTION. 

assured  public  tranquillity.  Nothing  could  be 
more  natural  than  for  African  slavery,  once  in 
troduced,  to  flourish  and  spread  under  the  one 
idea,  and  languish  and  die  under  the  other.  It 
is  high  time  to  be  done  saying  that  the  South 
retained  slavery  and  the  North  renounced  it 
merely  because  to  the  one  it  was,  and  to  the 
other  it  was  not,  lucrative.  It  was  inevitable  that 
the  most  conspicuous  feature  of  one  civilization 
should  become  the  public  schoolhouse,  and  of 
the  other  the  slave  yard.  Who  could  wish  to 
v  raise  the  equally  idle  and  offensive  question  of 
praise  and  blame?  When  Northerners  came 
South  by  thousands  and  made  their  dwelling 
there,  ninety-nine  hundredths  of  them  fell  into 
our  Southern  error  up  to  the  eyes,  and  there  is 
nothing  to  prove  that  had  the  plantation  idea,  to 
the  exclusion  of  the  village  idea,  been  planted 
in  all  the  colonies,  we  should  not  by  this  time 
have  had  a  West  Indian  civilization  from  Florida 
to  Oregon.  But  it  was  not  to  be  so.  Wherever 
the  farm  village  became  the  germinal  unit  of 
social  organization,  there  was  developed  in  its 
most  comprehensive  integrity,  that  American 
idea  of  our  Northern  and  Southern  fathers,  the 
representative  self-government  of  the  whole 
people  by  the  constant  free  consent  of  all  to  the 
frequently  reconsidered  choice  of  the  majority. 

. 


THE  NEGRO  QUESTION.  2g 

Such  a  scheme  can  be  safe  only  when  it  in 
cludes  inherently  the  continual  and  diligent  ele 
vation  of  that  lower  mass  which  human  society 
everywhere  is  constantly  precipitating.  But 
slave-holding  on  any  large  scale  could  not  make 
even  a  show  of  public  safety  without  the  con 
tinual  and  diligent  debasement  of  its  enslaved 
lower  millions.  Wherever  it  prevailed  it  was 
bound  by  the  natural  necessities  of  its  own  ex 
istence  to  undermine  and  corrode  the  National 
scheme.  It  mistaught  the  new  generations  of 
the  white  South  that  the  slave-holding  fathers  of 
the  Republic  were  approvers  and  advocates  of 
that  sad  practice,  which  by  their  true  histories 
we  know  they  would  gladly  have  destroyed.  It 
mistaught  us  to  construe  the  right  of  a  uniform 
government  of  all  by  all,  not  as  a  common  and 
inalienable  right  of  man,  but  as  a  privilege  that 
became  a  right  only  by  a  people's  merit,  and 
which  our  forefathers  bought  with  the  blood  of 
the  Revolution  in  I776-'S3,  and  which  our  slaves 
did  not  and  should  not  be  allowed  to  acquire. 
It  mistaught  us  to  seek  prosperity  in  the  con 
centration  instead  of  the  diffusion  of  wealth,  to 
seek  public  safety  in  a  state  of  siege  rather  than 
in  a  state  of  peace ;  it  gave  us  subjects  instead 
of  fellow-citizens,  and  falsely  threatened  us  with 
the  utter  shipwreck  of  public  and  private  society 


30  THE  NEGRO  QUESTION. 

if  we  dared  accord  civil  power  to  the  degraded 
millions  to  whom  we  had  forbidden  patriotism. 
Thus,  it  could  not  help  but  misteach  us  also  to 
subordinate  to  its  preservation  the  maintenance 
of  a  National  union  with  those  Northern  com 
munities  to  whose  whole  scheme  of  order  slave- 
holding  was  intolerable,  and  to  rise  at  length 
against  the  will  of  the  majority  and  dissolve  the 
Union  when  that  majority  refused  to  give  slave- 
holding  the  National  sanction. 

The  other  system  taught  the  inherent  right  of 
all  human  society  to  self-government.  It  taught 
-\\  ,/ the  impersonal  civil  equality  of  all.  It  admitted 
that  the  private,  personal  inequality  of  individuals 
is  inevitable,  necessary,  right  and  good;  but  con 
demned  its  misuse  to  set  up  arbitrary  public 
inequalities.  It  declared  public  equality  to  be,  on 
the  one  hand,  the  only  true  and  adequate  coun 
terpoise  against  private  inequalities,  and,  on  the 
other,  the  best  protector  and  promotor  of  just 
private  inequalities  against  unjust.  It  held  that 
virtue,  intelligence  and  wealth  are  their  own 
sufficient  advantage,  and  need  for  self-protection 
no  arbitrary  civil  preponderance;  that  their 
powers  of  self-protection  are  never  inadequate 
save  when  by  forgetting  equity  they  mass  and 
exasperate  ignorance,  vice  and  poverty  against 
them.  It  insisted  that  there  is  no  safe  protection 


THE  NEGRO  QUESTION.  31 

but  self-protection ;  that  poverty  needs  at  least 
as  much  civil  equipment  for  self-protection  as 
property  needs;  that  the  right  and  liberty  to 
acquire  intelligence,  virtue  and  wealth  are  just 
as  precious  as  the  right  and  liberty  to  maintain 
them,  and  need  quite  as  much  self-protection; 
that  the  secret  of  public  order  and  highest  pros 
perity  is  the  common  and  equal  right  of  all  law 
fully  to  acquire  as  well  as  retain  every  equitable 
means  of  self-aggrandizement,  and  that  this  right 
is  assured  to  all  only  through  the  consent  of  all 
to  the  choice  of  the  majority  frequently  appealed 
to  without  respect  of  persons.  And  last,  it  truly 
taught  that  a  government  founded  on  these  prin 
ciples  and  holding  them  essential  to  public  peace 
and  safety  might  comfortably  bear  the  proximity 
of  alien  neighbors,  whose  ideas  of  right  and 
order  were  not  implacably  hostile;  but  that  it 
had  no  power  to  abide  unless  it  could  put  down 
any  internal  mutiny  against  that  choice  of  the 
majority  which  was,  as  it  were,  the  Nation's  first 
commandment. 

The  war  was  fought  and  the  Union  saved. 
Fought  as  it  was,  on  the  issue  of  the  consent  of 
all  to  the  choice  of  the  majority,  the  conviction 
forced  its  way  that  the  strife  would  never  end  in 
peace  until  the  liberty  of  self-government  was 
guaranteed  to  the  entire  people,  and  slavery,  as 


32  THE  NEGRO  QUESTION. 

standing  for  the  doctrine  of  public  safety  by  sub 
jugation,  destroyed.  Hence,  first,  emancipation, 
and  then,  enfranchisement.  And  now  even  the 
Union  saved  is  not  the  full  measure  of  the  Na 
tion's  triumphs;  but,  saved  once  by  arms,  it 
seems  at  length  to  have  achieved  a  better  and 
fuller  salvation  still ;  for  the  people  of  the  once 
seceded  States,  with  a  sincerity  that  no  generous 
mind  can  question,  have  returned  to  their  old 
love  of  this  saved  Union,  and  the  great  North, 
from  East  to  utmost  West,  full  of  elation,  and 
feeling  what  one  may  call  the  onus  of  the  win 
ning  side,  cries  "Enough!"  and  asks  no  more. 

II. 

Thus  stands  the  matter  to-day.  Old  foes  are 
clasping  hands  on  fields  where  once  they  met  in 
battle,  and  touching  glasses  across  the  banqueting 
board,  pledging  long  life  to  the  Union  and  pros 
perity  to  the  South,  but  at  every  feast  there  is 
one  empty  seat. 

Why  should  one  seat  be  ever  empty,  and  every 
guest  afraid  to  look  that  way?  Because  the 
Southern  white  man  swears  upon  his  father's 
sword  that  none  but  a  ghost  shall  ever  sit  there. 
And  a  ghost  is  there ;  the  ghost  of  that  old 
heresy  of  public  safety  by  the  mass's  subjugation. 
This  is  what  the  Northern  people  cannot  under- 


THE  NEGRO  QUESTION.  33 

stand.  This  is  what  makes  the  Southern  white 
man  an  enigma  to  all  the  world  beside,  if  not 
also  to  himself.  To-day  the  pride  with  which  he 
boasts  himself  a  citizen  of  the  United  States  and 
the  sincerity  with  which  he  declares  for  free  gov 
ernment  as  the  only  safe  government  cannot  be 
doubted;  to-morrow  comes  an  explosion,  fol 
lowed  by  such  a  misinterpretation  of  what  free 
government  requires  and  forbids  that  it  is  hard 
to  identify  him  with  the  nineteenth  century. 
Emancipation  destroyed  domestic  bondage ;  en 
franchisement,  as  nearly  as  its  mere  decree  can, 
has  abolished  public  servitude ;  how,  then,  does 
this  old  un-American,  undemocratic  idea  of  sub 
jugation,  which  our  British  mother  country  and 
Europe  as  well  are  so  fast  repudiating — how 
does  it  remain  ?  Was  it  not  founded  in  these! 
two  forms  of  slavery?  The  mistake  lies  j 
there :  They  were  founded  in  it,  and  removing 
them  has  not  removed  it. 

It  has  always  been  hard  for  the  North  to 
understand  the  alacrity  with  which  the  ex-slave 
holder  learned  to  condemn  as  a  moral  and  eco 
nomic  error  that  slavery  in  defense  of  which  he 
endured  four  years  of  desolating  war.  But  it 
was  genuine,  and  here  is  the  explanation :  He 
believed  personal  enslavement  essential  to  subju 
gation.  Emancipation  at  one  stroke  proved  it 
4 


34  THE  NEGRO  QUESTION. 

was  not.  But  it  proved  no  more.  Unfortunately 
for  the  whole  Nation  there  was  already  before 
emancipation  came,  a  defined  status,  a  peculiar 
niche,  waiting  for  freed  negroes.  They  were 
nothing  new.  Nor  was  it  new  to  lose  personal 
ownership  in  one's  slave.  When,  under  emanci 
pation,  no  one  else  could  own  him,  we  quickly 
saw  he  was  not  lost  at  all.  There  he  stood,  beg 
gar  to  us  for  room  for  the  sole  of  his  foot,  the 
land  and  all  its  appliances  ours,  and  he,  by  the 
stress  of  his  daily  needs,  captive  to  the  land. 
The  moment  he  fell  to  work  of  his  own  free  will, 
we  saw  that  emancipation  was  even  more  ours 
than  his;  public  order  stood  fast,  our  homes 
were  safe,  our  firesides  uninvaded  ;  he  still  served, 
we  still  ruled ;  all  need  of  holding  him  in  private 
bondage  was  disproved,  and  when  the  notion  of 
necessity  vanished  the  notion  of  right  vanished 
with  it.  Emancipation  had  destroyed  private,  but 
it  had  not  disturbed  public  subjugation.  The/ 
ex-slave  was  not  a  free  man  ;  he  was  only  a  free  j 
negro. 

Then  the  winners  of  the  war  saw  that  the 
great  issue  which  had  jeopardized  the  Union  was 
not  settled.  The  Government's  foundation  prin 
ciple  was  not  reestablished,  and  could  not  be 
while  millions  of  the  country's  population  were 
without  a  voice  as  to  who  should  rule,  who 


THE  NEGRO  QUESTION.  35 

should  judge,  and  what  should  be  law.  But,  as 
we  have  seen,  the  absolute  civil  equality  of  pri 
vately  and  socially  unequal  men  was  not  the 
whole  American  idea.  It  was  counterbalanced 
by  an  enlarged  application  of  the  same  principle 
in  the  absolute  equality  of  unequal  States  in  the 
Federal  Union,  one  of  the  greatest  willing  con 
cessions  ever  made  by  stronger  political  bodies 
to  weaker  ones  in  the  history  of  government. 
Now  manifestly  this  great  concession  of  equality 
among  the  unequal  States  becomes  inordinate, 
unjust  and  dangerous  when  millions  of  the  peo 
ple  in  one  geographical  section,  native  to  the 
soil,  of  native  parentage,  having  ties  of  interest 
and  sympathy  with  no  other  land,  are  arbitrarily 
denied  that  political  equality  within  the  States 
which  obtains  elsewhere  throughout  the  Union. 
This  would  make  us  two  countries.  But  we  can 
not  be  two  merely  federated  countries  without 
changing  our  whole  plan  of  government;  and 
we  cannot  be  one  without  a  common  foundation. 
Hence  the  freedman's  enfranchisement.  It  was 
given  him  not  only  because  enfranchisement  was 
his  only  true  emancipation,  but  also  because  it 
was,  and  is,  impossible  to  withhold  it  and  carry 
on  American  government  on  American  ground 
principles.  Neither  the  Nation's  honor  nor  its 
safety  could  allow  the  restoration  of  revolted 


36  THE  NEGRO  QUESTION. 

States  to  their  autonomy  with  their  populations 
divided  by  lines  of  status  abhorrent  to  the  whole 
National  structure. 

Northern  men  often  ask  perplexedly  if  the 
freedman's  enfranchisement  was  not,  as  to  the 
South,  premature  and  inexpedient;  while  South 
ern  men  as  often  call  it  the  one  vindictive  act  of 
the  conqueror,  as  foolish  as  it  was  cruel.  It  was 
cruel.  Not  by  intention,  and,  it  may  be,  unavoid 
ably,  but  certainly  it  was  not  cruel  for  its  haste 
but  for  its  tardiness.  Had  enfranchisement  come 
into  effect,  as  emancipation  did,  while  the  smoke 
of  the  war's  last  shot  was  still  in  the  air,  when 
force  still  ruled  unquestioned,  and  civil  order 
and  system  had  not  yet  superseded  martial  law, 
the  agonies,  the  shame  and  the  incalculable 
losses  of  the  Reconstruction  period  that  followed 
might  have  been  spared  the  South  and  the 
Nation.  Instead  there  came  two  unlucky  post 
ponements,  the  slow  doling  out  of  re-enfranchise 
ment  to  the  best  intelligence  of  Southern  white 
society  and  the  delay  of  the  freedman's  enfran 
chisement — his  civil  emancipation  —  until  the 
"  Old  South,"  instead  of  reorganizing  public 
society  in  harmony  with  the  National  idea, 
largely  returned  to  its  entrenchments  in  the 
notion  of  exclusive  white  rule.  Then,  too  late 
to  avert  a  new  strife,  and  as  little  more  than  a 


THE  NEGRO  QUESTION.  37 

defensive  offset,  the  freedman  was  invested  with 
citizenship,  and  the  experiment  begun  of  trying 
to  establish  a  form  of  public  order,  wherein, 
under  a  political  equality  accorded  by  all  citizens, 
to  all  citizens,  new  and  old,  intelligence  and  vir 
tue  would  be  so  free  to  combine,  and  ignorance 
and  vice  feel  so  free  to  divide,  as  to  insure  the 
majority's  free  choice  of  rulers  of  at  least  enough 
intelligence  and  virtue  to  secure  safety,  order 
and  progress.  This  experience,  the  North  be 
lieved,  would  succeed,  and  since  this  was  the 
organic  embodiment  of  the  American  idea  for 
which  it  had  just  shed  seas  of  blood,  it  stands  to 
reason  the  North  would  not  have  allowed  it  to 
fail.  But  the  old  South,  still  bleeding  from  her 
thousand  wounds,  but  as  brave  as  when  she  fired 
her  first  gun,  believed  not  only  that  the  experi 
ment  would  fail,  but  also  that  it  was  dangerous 
and  dishonorable.  And  to-day,  both  in  North? 
and  South,  a  widespread  impression  prevails  that  1 
this  is  the  experiment  which  was  made  and  did  [ 
in  fact  fail.  Whereas  it  is  just  what  the  Old ( 
South  never  allowed  to  be  tried.  ( 

This  is  the  whole  secret  of  the  Negro  Quesa 
tion's  vital  force  to-day.  And  yet  the  struggle/ 
in  the  Southern  States  has  never  been  by  the  1 
blacks  for  and  by  the  whites  against  a  black/ 
supremacy,  but  only  for  and  against  an  arbitraryl 


38  THE  NEGRO  QUESTION. 

pure  white  supremacy.  From  the  very  first  until 
this  day,  in  all  the  freedman's  intellectual  crudity, 
he  has  held  fast  to  the  one  true,  National  doc 
trine  of  the  absence  of  privilege  and  the  rule  of 
all  by  all,  through  the  common  and  steadfast 
consent  of  all  to  the  free  and  frequent  choice  of 
the  majority.  He  has  never  rejected  white  men's 
political  fellowship  or  leadership  because  it  was 
white,  but  only  and  always  when  it  was  unsound 
in  this  doctrine.  His  party  has  never  been  a 
purely  black  party  in  fact  or  principle.  The 
"  solid  black  vote  "  is  only  by  outside  pressure 
solidified  about  a  principle  of  American  liberty, 
which  is  itself  against  solidity  and  destroys  the 
political  solidity  of  classes  wherever  it  has  free 
play.  But  the  "  solid  white  vote  " — which  is  not 
solid  by  including  all  whites,  but  because  no 
colored  man  can  truly  enter  its  ranks,  much  less 
its  councils,  without  accepting  an  emasculated 
emancipation — the  solid  white  vote  is  solid,  not 
by  outside  pressure  but  by  inherent  principle. 
Solid  twice  over;  first,  in  each  State,  from  sincere 
motives  of  self-preservation,  solid  in  keeping  the 
old  servile  class,  by  arbitrary  classification,  ser 
vile  ;  and  then  solid  again  by  a  tacit  league  of 
Southern  States  around  the  assumed  right  of 
each  State  separately  to  postpone  a  true  and  com 
plete  emancipation  as  long  as  the  fear  remains 


THE  NEGRO  QUESTION.  39 

that,  with  full  American  liberty — this  and  no 
more — to  all  alike,  the  freedman  would  himself 
usurp  the  arbitrary  domination  now  held  over 
him  and  plunder  and  destroy  society. 

So,  then,  the  Southern  question  at  its  root  is 
simply  whether  there  is  any  real  ground  suffi 
cient  to  justify  this  fear  and  the  attitude  taken 
against  it.  Only  remove  this  fear,  which  rests 
on  a  majority  of  the  whole  white  South  despite"" 
all  its  splendid,  well-proved  courage,  and  the 
question  of  right,  in  law  and  in  morals,  will  van 
ish  along  with  the  notion  of  necessity. 

Whoever  attempts  to  remove  this  apprehen 
sion  must  meet  it  in  two  forms :  First,  fear  of  a 
hopeless  wreck  of  public  government  by  a  com 
plete  supremacy  of  the  lower  mass ;  and  second, 
fear  of  a  yet  more  dreadful  wreck  of  private 
society  in  a  deluge  of  social  equality. 

III. 

Now,  as  to  public  government,  the  freedman, 
whatever  may  be  said  of  his  mistakes,  has  never 
shown  an  intentional  preference  for  anarchy. 
Had  he  such  a  bent  he  would  have  betrayed 
something  of  it  when  our  civil  war  offered  as 
wide  an  opportunity  for  its  indulgence  as  any 
millions  in  bondage  ever  had.  He  has  shown  at 
least  as  prompt  a  choice  for  peace  and  order  as 


4O  THE  NEGRO  QUESTION. 

any  "  lower  million  "  ever  showed.  The  vices 
said  to  be  his  in  inordinate  degree  are  only  such 
as  always  go  with  degradation,  and  especially 
with  a  degraded  status ;  and  when,  in  Recon 
struction  years,  he  held  power  to  make  and  un 
make  laws,  amid  all  his  degradation,  all  the 
efforts  to  confine  him  still  to  an  arbitrary  servile 
status,  and  all  his  vicious  special  legislation,  he 
never  removed  the  penalties  from  anything  that 
the  world  at  large  calls  a  crime.  Neither  did  he 
ever  show  any  serious  disposition  to  establish 
race  rule.  The  whole  spirit  of  his  emancipation^ 
and  enfranchisement,  and  his  whole  struggle,! 
was,  and  is,  to  put  race  rule  of  all  sorts  underl 
foot,  and  set  up  the  common  rule  of  all.  The 
fear  of  anarchy  in  the  Southern  States,  then,  is 
only  that  perfectly  natural  and  largely  excusable 
fear  that  besets  the  upper  ranks  of  society  every 
where,  and  often  successfully  tempts  them  to/ 
commit  inequitable  usurpations ;  and  yet  a  fear 
of  which  no  amount  of  power  or  privilege  ever 
relieves  them — the  fear  that  the  stupid,  the  des 
titute  and  the  vicious  will  combine  against  them 
and  rule  by  sheer  weight  of  numbers. 

Majority  rule  is  an  unfortunate  term,  in  that  it 
falsely  implies  this  very  thing  ;  whereas  its  mis 
sion  in  human  affairs  is  to  remove  precisely  this 
danger.  In  fact  a  minority  always  rules.  At  least  \ 


THE  NEGRO  QUESTION.  41 

it  always  can.  All  the  great  majority  ever  strives, 
for  is  the  power  to  choose  by  what,  and  whan 
kind  of,  a  minority  it  shall  be  ruled.  What  that 
choosing  majority  shall  consist  of,  and  hence  the 
wisdom  and  public  safety  of  its  choice,  will 
depend  mainly  upon  the  attitude  of  those  who 
hold,  against  the  power  of  mere  numbers,  the 
far  greater  powers  of  intelligence,  of  virtue  and 
of  wealth.  If  these  claim,  by  virtue  of  their 
own  self-estimate,  an  arbitrary  right  to  rule  and 
say  who  shall  rule,  the  lower  elements  of  society 
will  be  bound  together  by  a  just  sense  of  griev 
ance  and  a  well-grounded  reciprocation  of  dis 
trust;  the  forced  rule  will  continue  only  till  it 
can  be  overturned,  and  while  it  lasts  will  be 
attended  by  largely  uncounted  but  enormous 
losses,  moral  and  material,  to  all  ranks  of  society. 
But  if  the  wise,  the  upright,  the  wealthy,  com 
mand  the  courage  of  our  American  fathers  to 
claim  for  all  men  a  common  political  equality, 
without  rank,  station  or  privilege,  and  give  their 
full  and  free  adherence  to  government  by  the  con 
sent  of  all  to  the  rule  of  a  minority  empowered  by 
the  choice  of  the  majority  frequently  appealed  to 
without  respect  of  persons,  then  ignorance,  des 
titution  and  vice  will  not  combine  to  make  the 
choosing  majority.  They  cannot.  They  carry 
in  themselves  the  very  principle  of  disintegra- 


42  THE  NEGRO  QUESTION. 

tion.  Without  the  outside  pressure  of  common 
and  sore  grievance,  they  have  no  lasting  powers 
of  cohesion.  The  minority  always  may  rule. 
It  need  never  rule  by  force  if  it  will  rule  by 
equity.  This  is  the  faith  of  our  fathers  of  the 
Revolution,  and  no  community  in  America  that 
has  built  squarely  and  only  upon  it  has  found  it 
unwise  or  unsafe. 

This  is  asserted  with  all  the  terrible  misrule 
of  Reconstruction  days  in  full  remembrance. 
For,  first  be  it  said  again,  that  sad  history  came 
not  by  a  reign  of  equal  rights  and  majority  rule, 
but  through  an  attempt  to  establish  them  while 
the  greater  part  of  the  wealth  and  intelligence  of 
the  region  involved  held  out  sincerely,  stead 
fastly  and  desperately  against  them,  and  for  the 
preservation  of  unequal  privileges  and  class 
domination.  The  Reconstruction  party,  even 
with  all  its  taxing,  stealing  and  defrauding,  and 
with  the  upper  ranks  of  society  at  war  as  fiercely 
against  its  best  principles  as  against  its  bad  prac-\ 
tices,  planted  the  whole  South  with  public  schools 
for  the  poor  and  illiterate  of  both  races,  welcomed 
and  cherished  the  missionaries  of  higher  educa 
tion,  and,  when  it  fell,  left  them  still  both  systems, 
with  the  master-class  converted  to  a  belief  in 
their  use  and  necessity.  The  history  of  Recon 
struction  dispassionately  viewed,  is  a  final,  trium- 


THE  NEGRO  QUESTION.  43 

phant  proof  that  all  our  Americam  scheme  needs 
to  make  it  safe  and  good,  in  the  South  as  else 
where,  is  consent  to  it  and  participation  in  it  by 
the  law-abiding,  intelligent  portions  of  the  people, 
with  one  common  freedom,  in  and  between  high 
life  and  low,  to  combine,  in  civil  matters,  against 
ignorance  and  vice,  in  high  life  and  low,  across, 
yet  without  disturbing,  the  lines  of  race  or  any 
other  line  of  private  rank  or  predilection. 

There  are  hundreds  of  thousands  in  the  South 
ern  States  who,  denying  this,  would  promptly 
concede  it  all  in  theory  and  in  practice,  but  for 
the  second  form  of  their  fear:  the  belief  that 
there  would  result  a  confusion  of  the  races  in 
private  society,  followed  by  intellectual  and  moral 
debasement  and  by  a  mongrel  posterity.  Unless  ^ 
this  can  be  shown  to  be  an  empty  fear,  our  i 
Southern  problem  cannot  be  solved. 

IV. 

The  mere  ambiguity  of  a  term  here  has  cost 
much  loss.     The  double  meaning  of  the  words^ 
"  social "  and  "  society  "  seems  to  have  been  a  real/ 
drawback  on  the  progress  of  political  ideas  among  / 
the  white  people  of  the  South.     The  clear  and) 
definite   term,  civil    equality,   they   have   made 
synonymous  with  the  very  vague  and  indefinite 
term,  social  equality,  and  then  turned  and  totally 


44  THE  NEGRO  QUESTION. 

misapplied  it  to  the  sacred  domains  of  private 
society.  If  the  idea  of  civil  equality  had  rightly 
any  such  application,  their  horror  would  certainly 
be  just.  To  a  forced  private  social  equality  the 
rest  of  the  world  has  the  same  aversion,  but  it 
knows  and  feels  that  such  a  thing  is  as  impossible 
in  fact  as  it  is  monstrous  in  thought.  Americans, 
in  general,  know  by  a  century's  experience,  that 
civil  equality  makes  no  such  proposal,  bears  no 
such  results.  They  know  that  public  society — 
civil  society — comprises  one  distinct  group  of 
mutual  relations,  and  private  society  entirely 
another,  and  that  it  is  simply  and  only  evil  to 
confuse  the  two.  They  see  that  public  society 
comprises  all  those  relations  that  are  impersonal, 
unselective,  and  in  which  all  men,  of  whatever 
personal  inequality,  should  stand  equal.  They 
recognize  that  private  society  is  its  opposite 
hemisphere ;  that  it  is  personal,  selective,  assort- 
ive,  ignores  civil  equality  without  violating  it, 
and  forms  itself  entirely  upon  mutual  private 
preferences  and  affinities.  They  agree  that  "civil 
status  has  of  right  no  special  value  in  private 
society,  and  that  their  private  social  status  has 
rightly  no  special  value  in  their  public  social — 
i.  e.y  their  merely  civil — relations.  Even  the 
Southern  freedman  is  perfectly  clear  on  these 
points ;  and  Northern  minds  are  often  puzzled  to 


THE  NEGRO  QUESTION.  45 

know  why  the  whites  of  our  Southern  States, 
almost  alone,  should  be  beset  by  a  confusion  of 
ideas  that  costs  them  all  the  tremendous  differ 
ences,  spiritual  and  material,  between  a  state  of 
truce  and  a  state  of  peace. 

But  the  matter  has  a  very  natural  explanation. 
Slavery  was  both  public  and  private,  domestic  as 
well  as  civil.  By  the  plantation  system  the 
members  of  the  master-class  were  almost  con 
stantly  brought  into  closer  contact  with  slaves 
than  with  their  social  equals.  The  defensive 
line  of  private  society  in  its  upper  ranks  was  an 
attenuated  one ;  hence  there  was  a  constant, 
well-grounded  fear  that  social  confusion — for  we 
may  cast  aside  the  term  "  social  equality"  as  pre 
posterous  —  that  social  confusion  would  be 
wrought  by  the  powerful  temptation  of  close 
and  continual  contact  between  two  classes — the 
upper  powerful  and  bold,  the  under  helpless  and 
sensual,  and  neither  one  socially  responsible  to  the 
other,  either  publicly  or  privately.  It  had  already 
brought  about  the  utter  confusion  of  race  and 
corruption  of  society  in  the  West  Indies  and  in 
1  Mexico,  and  the  only  escape  from  a  similar  fate 
seemed  to  our  Southern  master-class  to  be  to 
annihilate  and  forget  the  boundaries  between 
public  right  and  private  choice,  and  treat  the 
appearance  anywhere  of  any  one  visibly  of 


46  THE  NEGRO  QUESTION. 

African  tincture  and  not  visibly  a  servant,  as  an 
assault  upon  the  purity  of  private  society,  to  be 
repelled  on  the  instant,  without  question  of  law 
or  authority,  as  one  would  fight  fire.  Now, 
under  slavery,  though  confessedly  inadequate, 
this  was  after  all  the  only  way ;  and  all  that  the 
whites  in  the  Southern  States  have  overlooked 
is  that  the  conditions  are  changed,  and  that  this 
policy  has  become  unspeakably  worse  than  use 
less.  Dissimilar  races  are  not  inclined  to  mix 
spontaneously.  The  common  enjoyment  of  equal 
civil  rights  never  mixed  two  such  races ;  it  has 
always  been  some  oppressive  distinction  between 
them  that,  by  holding  out  temptations  to  vice 
instead  of  rewards  to  virtue,  has  done  it ;  and 
because  slavery  is  the  foulest  of  oppressions  it 
makes  the  mixture  of  races  in  morally  foulest 
form.  Race  fusion  is  not  essential  to  National 
unity ;  such  unity  requires  only  civil  and  political, 
not  private  social,  homogeneity.  The  contact  of 
superior  and  inferior  is  not  of  necessity  degrad 
ing  ;  it  is  the  kind  of  contact  that  degrades  or 
elevates ;  and  public  equality,^-  equal  public 
rights,  common  public  liberty,  equal  mutual 
responsibility — this  is  the  great  essential  to  be 
neficent  contact  across  the  lines  of  physical,  intel 
lectual  and  moral  difference,  and  the  greatest 
safeguard  of  private  society  that  human  law  or 
custom  can  provide. 


THE  NEGRO  QUESTION.  47 

V. 

Thus  we  see  that,  so  far  from  a  complete  eman 
cipation  of  the  freedman  bringing  those  results 
in  the  Southern  States  which  the  white  people 
there  so  justly  abhor,  but  so  needlessly  fear,  it  is 
the  only  safe  and  effectual  preventive  of  those 
results,  and  final  cure  of  a  state  of  inflammation 
which  nothing  but  the  remaining  vestiges  of  an 
incompletely  abolished  slavery  perpetuates.  The 
abolition  of  the  present  stage  of  siege  rests  with 
the  Southern  white  man.  He  can  abolish  it,  if 
he  will,  with  safety  and  at  once.  The  results 
will  not  be  the  return  of  Reconstruction  days, 
nor  the  incoming  of  any  sort  of  black  rule,  nor 
the  supremacy  of  the  lower  mass — either  white, 
black  or  mixed ;  nor  the  confusion  of  ranks  and 
races  in  private  society ;  nor  the  thronging  of 
black  children  into  white  public  schools,  which 
never  happened  even  in  the  worst  Reconstruc 
tion  days  ;  nor  any  attendance  at  all  of  colored 
children  in  white  schools  or  of  white  in  colored, 
save  where  exclusion  would  work  needless  hard 
ship  ;  nor  any  new  necessity  to  teach  children — 
what  they  already  know  so  well — that  the  public 
school  relation  is  not  a  private  social  relation; 
nor  any  greater  or  less  necessity  for  parents  to 
oversee  their  children's  choice  of  companions  in 


48  THE  NEGRO  QUESTION. 

school  or  out ;  nor  a  tenth  as  much  or  as  mis 
chievous  playmating  of  white  and  colored  chil 
dren  as  there  was  in  the  days  of  slavery ;  nor  any 
new  obstruction  of  civil  or  criminal  justice;  nor 
any  need  of  submitting  to  any  sort  of  offensive 
contact  from  a  colored  person,  that  it  would  be 
right  to  resent  if  he  were  white.  But  seven  dark 
American-born  millions  would  find  themselves 
freed  from  their  constant  liability  to  public,  legal 
ized  indignity.  They  would  find  themselves,  for 
the  first  time  in  their  history,  holding  a  patent, 
with  the  seal  of  public  approval,  for  all  the  aspi 
rations  of  citizenship  and  all  the  public  rewards 
of  virtue  and  intelligence.  Not  merely  would 
their  million  voters  find  themselves  admitted  to, 
and  faithfully  counted  at,  the  polls — whether 
they  are  already  or  not  is  not  here  discussed — 
but  they  would  find  themselves,  as  never  before, 
at  liberty  to  choose  between  political  parties. 
These  are  some  of  the  good — and  there  need  be 
no  ill — changes  that  will  come  whenever  a  ma 
jority  of  the  Southern  whites  are  willing  to  vote 
for  them. 

There  is  a  vague  hope,  much  commoner  in 
the  North  than  in  the  South,  that  somehow,  if 
everybody  will  sit  still,  "time"  will  bring  these 
changes.  A  large  mercantile  element,  especially, 
would  have  the  South  "let  politics  alone."  It  is 


THE  NEGRO  QUESTION.  49 

too  busy  to  understand  that  whatever  people  lets 
politics  alone  is  doomed.  There  are  things  that 
mere  time  can  do,  but  only  vigorous  agitation 
can  be  trusted  to  change  the  fundamental  convic 
tions  on  which  a  people  has  built  society.  Time 
may  do  it  at  last,  but  it  is  likely  to  make  bloody 
work  of  it.  For  either  foundation  idea  on  which 
society  may  build  must,  if  let  alone,  multiply 
upon  itself.  The  elevation  idea  brings  safety, 
and  safety  constantly  commends  and  intensifies 
itself  and  the  elevation  idea.  The  subjugation 
jdea  brings  danger,  and  the  sense  of  danger  con 
stantly  intensifies  the  subjugation  idea.  Time 
may  be  counted  on  for  such  lighter  things  as  the 
removal  of  animosities  and  suspicions,  and  this 
in  our  Nation's  case  it  has  done.  Neither  North 
nor  South  now  holds,  or  suspects  the  other  of 
holding,  any  grudge  for  the  late  war.  But  trust 
ing  time  to  do  more  than  this  is  but  trusting  to 
luck,  and  trusting  to  luck  is  a  crime. 

What  is  luck  doing  ?  Here  is  the  exclusive 
white  party  in  the  Southern  States  calling  itself, 
and  itself  only,  "The  South,"  praying  the  Nation 
to  hold  off,  not  merely  its  interference,  but  its 
counsel — even  its  notice — while  it,  not  removes, 
but  refines,  polishes,  decorates  and  disguises  to 
its  own  and  the  Nation's  eyes,  this  corner-stone 
of  all  its  own  and  the  South's,  the  whole  South's 
5 


50  THE  NEGRO  QUESTION. 

woes ;  pleading  the  inability  of  any  but  itself  to 
"  understand  the  negro,"  when,  in  fact,  itself  has 
had  to  correct  more,  and  more  radical  mistakes 
about  the  negro  since  the  war  than  all  the  Nation 
beside;  failing  still,  more  than  twenty  years  since 
Reconstruction  began  and  more  than  ten  since 
its  era  closed,  to  offer  any  definition  of  the  freed- 
man's  needs  and  desires  which  he  can  accept ; 
making  daily  statements  of  his  preferences  which 
the  one  hundred  newspapers  published  for  his 
patronage,  and  by  himself,  daily  and  unanimously 
repudiate;  trying  to  settle  affairs  on  the  one  only 
false  principle  of  public  social  order  that  keeps 
them  unsettled  ;  proposing  to  settle  upon  a  sine 
qua  non  that  shuts  out  of  its  councils  the  whole 
opposite  side  of  the  only  matter  in  question; 
and  holding  out  for  a  settlement  which,  whether 
effected  or  not,  can  but  perpetuate  a  disturbance 
of  inter-state  equality  fatal  to  the  Nation's  peace 
— a  settlement  which  is  no  more  than  a  refusal 
to  settle  at  all. 

Meanwhile,  over  a  million  American  citizens, 
with  their  wives  and  children,  suffer  a  suspension 
of  their  full  citizenship,  and  are  virtually  subjects 
and  not  citizens,  peasants  instead  of  freemen. 
They  cannot  seize  their  rights  by  force,  and  the 
Nation  would  never  allow  it  if  they  could.  But 
they  are  learning  one  of  the  worst  lessons  class 


THE  NEGRO  QUESTION.  5  I 

rule  can  teach  them — exclusive,  even  morbid, 
pre-occupation  in  their  rights  as  a  class,  and 
inattention  to  the  general  affairs  of  their  com 
munities,  their  States  and  the  Nation.  Mean 
while,  too,  the  present  one-sided  effort  at  settle 
ment  by  subjugation  is  not  only  debasing  to  th 
under  mass,  but  corrupting  to  the  upper.  For/ 
it  teaches  these  to  set  aside  questions  of  righr 
and  wrong  for  questions  of  expediency ;  to  wink 
at  and  at  times  to  defend  and  turn  to  account 
evasions,  even  bold  infractions,  of  their  own  laws, 
when  done  to  preserve  arbitrary  class  domina 
tion;  to  vote  confessedly  for  bad  men  and  meas 
ures  as  against  better,  rather  than  jeopardize  the 
white  man's  solid  party  and  exclusive  power ;  to 
regard  virtue  and  intelligence,  vice  and  igno 
rance,  as  going  by  race,  and  to  extenuate  and 
let  go  unprosecuted  the  most  frightful  crimes 
against  the  under  class,  lest  that  class,  being 
avenged,  should  gather  a  boldness  inconsistent 
with  its  arbitrarily  fixed  status.  Such  results  as 
these  are  contrary  to  our  own  and  to  all  good 
government. 

VI. 

There  is  now  going  on  in  several  parts  of  the 
South  a  remarkable  development  of  material 
wealth.  Mills,  mines,  furnaces,  quarries,  railways 
are  multiplying  rapidly.  The  eye  that  cannot 


52  THE  NEGRO  QUESTION. 

see  the  value  of  this  aggrandizement  must  be 
dull  indeed.  But  many  an  eye,  in  North  and 
South,  and  to  the  South's  loss,  is  crediting  it 
with  values  that  it  has  not.  To  many  the  "  New 
South"  we  long  for  means  only  this  industrial 
and  commercial  expansion,  and  our  eager  mer 
cantile  spirit  forgets  that  even  for  making  a 
people  rich  in  goods  a  civil  order  on  sound 
foundations  is  of  greater  value  than  coal  or 
metals,  or  spindles  and  looms.  May  the  South 
grow  rich  !  But  eveiy  wise  friend  of  the  South 
will  wish,  besides,  to  see  wealth  built  upon  pub 
lic  provisions  for  securing  through  it  that  gen 
eral  beneficence,  without  which  it  is  not  really 
wealth.  He  would  not  wish  those  American 
States  a  wealth  like  that  which  once  was  Spain's. 
He  would  not  wish  to  see  their  society  more 
diligent  for  those  conditions  that  concentrate 
wealth  than  for  those  that  disseminate  it.  Yet 
he  must  see  it.  That  is  the  situation,  despite 
the  assurances  of  a  host  of  well-meaning  flatterers 
that  a  New  South  is  laying  the  foundations  of  a 
permanent  prosperity.  They  cannot  be  laid  on 
the  old  plantation  idea,  and  much  of  that  which 
is  loosely  called  the  New  South  to-day  is  farthest 
from  it — it  is  only  the  Old  South  readapting  the 
old  plantation  idea  to  a  peasant  labor  and  min 
eral  products.  Said  a  mine  owner  of  the  far 


THE  NEGRO  QUESTION.  53 

North  lately :  "  We  shall  never  fear  their  com 
petition  till  they  get  rid  of  that  idea."  A  lasting 
prosperity  cannot  be  hoped  for  without  a  dis 
seminated  wealth,  and  public  social  conditions 
to  keep  it  from  congestion.  But  this  dissemina 
tion  cannot  be  got  save  by  a  disseminated  intel 
ligence,  nor  intelligence  be  disseminated  without 
a  disseminated  education,  nor  this  be  brought  to 
any  high  value,  without  liberty,  responsibility, 
private  inequality,  public  equality,  self-regard, 
virtue,  aspirations  and  their  rewards. 

Many  ask  if  this  new  material  development  of 
the  South  will  not  naturally  be  followed  by  ade 
quate  public  provisions  for  this  dissemination  by- 
and-by.  There  is  but  one  safe  answer :  That  it 
has  never  so  happened  in  America.  From  our 
furthest  East  to  our  furthest  West,  whenever  a 
community  has  established  social  order  in  the 
idea  of  the  elevation  of  the  masses,  it  has  planned, 
not  for  education  and  liberty  to  follow  from 
wealth  and  intelligence,  but  for  wealth  and  intel 
ligence  to  follow  from  education  and  liberty ;  and 
the  community  whose  intelligent  few  do  not 
make  the  mass's  elevation  by  public  education 
and  equal  public  liberty  the  corner-stone  of  a 
projected  wealth,  is  not  more  likely  to  provide  it 
after  wealth  is  achieved  and  mostly  in  their  own 
hands. 


54  THE  NEGRO  QUESTION. 

L-  Our  American  public-school  idea — American 
at  least  in  contrast  with  any  dissimilar  notion — 
is  that  a  provision  for  public  education  adequate 
for  the  whole  people,  is  not  a  benevolent  conces 
sion  but  a  paying  investment,  constantly  and 
absolutely  essential  to  confirm  the  safety  of  a 
safe  scheme  of  government.  The  maintenance 
and  growth  of  public  education  in  the  Southern 
States,  as  first  established  principally  under  re 
construction  rule,  sadly  insufficient  as  it  still  is, 
is  mainly  due  to  the  partial  triumph  of  this  idea 
in  the  minds  of  the  Southern  whites,  and  its  eager 
acceptance,  with  or  without  discordant  condi 
tions,  by  the  intelligent  blacks,  and  in  no  region 
is  rightly  attributable  to  an  exceptionable  increase 
of  wealth.  Much  less  is  it  attributable,  as  is  often 
conjectured,  to  the  influx  of  Northern  capital  and 
capitalists,  bringing  Northern  ideas  with  them. 
It  ought  to  go  without  saying,  that  immigration, 
with  or  without  capital,  will  always  try  to  assim 
ilate  itself  to  the  state  of  society  into  which  it 
comes.  Every  impulse  of  commerce  is  not  to 
disturb  any  vexed  issue  until  such  issue  throws 
itself  immediately  across  the  path.  It  never  pur 
posely  molests  a  question  of  social  order.  So  it 
is  in  the  South. 

Certain  public  men  in  both  North  and  South 
have  of  late  years  made,  with  the  kindest  inten- 


THE  NEGRO  QUESTION.  55 

tions,  an  unfortunate  misuse  of  statistical  facts  to 
make  it  appear  that  public  society  in  the  South 
is  doing,  not  all  that  should  be  done,  but  all  it 
can  do,  for  the  establishment  of  permanent  safety 
and  harmony  through  the  elevation  of  the  lower 
masses  especially,  in  the  matter  of  public  educa 
tion.  In  truth,  these  facts  do  not  prove  the  state 
ment  they  are  called  upon  to  prove,  and  do  the 
Southern  States  no  kindness  in  lulling  them  to  a 
belief  in  it.*  It  is  said,  for  instance,  that  certain  v 
Southern  States  are  now  spending  more  annually 
for  public  education,  in  proportion  to  their  tax 
able  wealth,  than  certain  Northern  States  noted 
for  the  completeness  of  their  public  school  sys 
tems.  Mississippi  may  thus  be  compared  with% 
Massachusetts.  But  really  the  comparison  is  a 
sad  injustice  to  the  Southern  State,  for  a  century 
of  public  education  has  helped  to  make  Massa 
chusetts  so  rich  that  she  is  able  to  spend  annu 
ally  twenty  dollars  per  head  upon  the  children 
in  her  public  schools,  while  Mississippi,  laying 
a  heavier  tax,  spends  upon  hers  but  two  dollars 
per  head.  Manifestly  it  is  unfair  to  a  State  whose 
public-school  system  is  new  to  compare  it  with 
any  whose  system  is  old.  The  public  school 


*  For  a  treatment  of  the  question  of  National  aid  to  Southern 
education,  see  the  short  article  printed  supplementary  to  this. 


5  6  THE  NEGRO  QUESTION. 

property  of  Ohio,  whose  population  is  one  mil 
lion,  is  over  twice  as  great  as  that  of  ten  States 
of  the  New  South,  whose  population  is  three  and 
a  half  times  as  large.*  And  yet  one  does  not 
need  to  go  as  far  as  the  "  new  West  "  to  find 
States  whose  tax-payers  spend  far  more  for  pub 
lic  education  than  Southern  communities  thus 
far  see  the  wisdom  or  need  of  investing.  With 
one  third  more  wealth  than  Virginia,  and  but 
one-tenth  the  percentage  of  illiteracy,  Iowa 
spends  over  four  times  as  much  per  year  for 
public  instruction.  With  one-fourth  less  wealth 
than  Alabama,  and  but  one-fourteenth  the  per 
centage  of  illiteracy,  Nebraska  spends  three  and 
a  half  times  as  much  per  year  for  public  instruc 
tion.  With  about  the  same  wealth  as  North  Car 
olina  and  less  than  one-eighth  the  percentage  of 
illiteracy,  Kansas  spends  over  five  times  as  much 
per  year  for  public  education.  If  the  comparison 
be  moved  westward  again  into  new  regions,  the 
Territory  of  Dakota  is  seen  making  an  "  expen 
diture  in  the  year  per  capita  on  average  attend 
ance  in  the  public  schools  "  of  $25.77,  being  more 
than  the  sum  of  the  like  per  capita  expenditures 
by  Mississippi,  South  Carolina,  Tennessee,  North 


*  See  Report  of  United  States  Commissioner  of  Education, 
l883-'84,  page  21,  last  column  of  table. 


THE  NEGRO  QUESTION.  $? 

Carolina,  Alabama  and  Georgia  combined.  In 
Colorado  it  is  about  the  same  as  in  Dakota,  while 
in  Nevada  it  is  much  greater  and  in  Arizona  twice 
as  large.  As  to  comparative  wealth,  the  taxable 
wealth  of  Dakota  in  1880,  at  least,  was  but  one 
two-thousandth  part  of  that  of  the  six  States  with 
which  it  is  compared. 

Now  what  is  the  real  truth  in  these  facts? 
That  the  full  establishment  of  this  American 
public-school  idea  and  of  that  elevation  idea  of 
which  it  is  an  exponent,  and  which  has  had  so 
much  to  do  toward  making  the  people  of  the 
Northern  States  the  wealthiest  people  in  the 
world,  waits  in  the  South  not  mainly  an  increase 
of  wealth,  but  rather  the  simple  consent  of  the 
Southern  white  man  to  see  society's  best  and 
earliest  safety,  the  quickest,  greatest  and  most 
lasting  aggrandizement,  in  that  public  equality 
of  all  men,  that  national  citizenship,  wider  than 
race  and  far  wider  than  the  lines  of  private 
society,  which  makes  the  elevation  of  the  masses, 
by  everything  that  tends  to  moral,  aesthetical 
and  intellectual  education,  in  school  and  out  of 
school,  the  most  urgent  and  fruitful  investment 
of  public  wealth  and  trust.  Just  this  sincere 
confession.  All  the  rest  will  follow.  The  black 
man  will  not  merely  be  tolerated  in  his  civil  and 
political  rights  as  now  sometimes  he  is  and 


58  THE  NEGRO  QUESTION. 

sometimes  he  is  not ;  but  he  will  be  welcomed 
into,  and  encouraged  and  urged  to  a  true  un 
derstanding,  valuation  and  acceptance  of  every 
public  duty  and  responsibility  of  citizenship,  ac 
cording  to  his  actual  personal  ability  to  respond. 
To  effect  this  is  not  the  herculean  and  danger 
ous  task  it  is  sometimes  said  to  be.  The  North 
has  20,000,000  foreign  immigrants  to  American 
ize,  and  only  this  way  to  do  it.  The  South,  for 
all  her  drawbacks,  has  this  comparative  advan 
tage  ;  that  her  lower  mass,  however  ignorant 
and  debased,  is  as  yet  wholly  American  in  its 
notions  of  order  and  government.  All  that  is 
wanting  is  to  more  completely  Americanize  her 
upper  class,  a  class  that  is  already  ruling  and 
will  still  rule  when  the  change  is  made ;  that 
wants  to  rule  wisely  and  prosperously,  and  that 
has  no  conscious  intention  of  being  un-Ameri 
can.  Only  this :  To  bring  the  men  of  best 
blood  and  best  brain  in  the  South  to-day,  not  to 
a  new  and  strange  doctrine,  but  back  to  the 
faith  of  their  fathers.  Let  but  this  be  done,  and 
there  may  be  far  less  cry  of  Peace,  Peace,  than 
now,  but  there  will  be  a  peace  and  a  union  be 
tween  the  Nation's  two  great  historic  sections 
such  as  they  have  not  seen  since  Virginia's 
Washington  laid  down  his  sword,  and  her  Jeffer 
son  his  pen. 


NATIONAL  AID  TO  SOUTHERN 
SCHOOLS. 

Should  the  National  Government  make  ap 
propriations  for  public  schools  ?  This  seems  to 
be  the  right  form  of  the  question ;  not  may  it  ? 
but  should  it  ?  If  it  may,  it  may ;  but  if  it  should, 
it  must.  The  Civil  War  taught  us  what  it  can 
cost  to  answer  "  we  should  "  with  "  we  may  not." 

We  ought  to  recognize  that  the  constitution 
ality  of  one  or  another  Congressional  bill  is  but 
a  small  part  of  the  question.  A  bill,  however 
fine  its  intention  may  be,  will  never  become 
operative  if  burdened  with  conditions  which  State 
majorities  consider  imperious  and  inquisitorial. 
Moreover,  to  base  the  plea  for  national  aid  upon 
the  presence  of  a  surplus  in  the  National  Treas 
ury  strikes  me  is  in  principle  extremely  mis 
chievous,  and  in  policy  fatal  to  the  measure. 
As  long  as  this  is  made  the  reason  why,  it  seems 
to  me  the  scheme  will  fail. 

And  yet  I  certainly  think  the  National  Gov 
ernment  should  make  appropriations  for  pub 
lic  schools  in  destitute  parts  of  the  country,  at 
least  in  the  South.  On  the  general  principle 
I  have  made  in  my  own  mind  these  points : 
59 


60  NATIONAL  AID 

First,  that  the  constitutionality  of  national  aid  to 
education  is  not  the  question  that  properly  comes 
first  in  order.  The  nation  should  first  ask  itself, 
"  Do  we  in  this  direction  owe  a  national  debt  ?" — 
for  if  so,  there  must  be,  and  we  are  bound  in 
honor  and  common  honesty  to  find,  some  con 
stitutional  way  to  liquidate  it.  If  we  owed  a  debt 
to  a  foreign  nation,  we  should  cut  a  sorry  figure 
pleading  that  we  could  not  make  it  constitutional 
to  pay  it.  Shall  we  not  treat  our  own  citizens 
as  well  as  we  would  have  to  treat  the  citizens  of 
a  foreign  government  ? 

I  think  we  are  confronted  here  with  a  distinctly 
national  debt.  The  educational  destitution  in 
the  South,  BO  contrary  to  our  American  scheme 
of  social  order,  is  distinctly  the  result  of  gross 
defects  in  that  social  order  inevitably  accom 
panying  the  institutional  establishment  of  African 
slavery.  It  was  certainly  the  Nation's  crime. 

It  is  not  enough  for  the  North  to  point  to  her 
bloody  expiation  in  war,  nor  the  South  to  her 
proportionately  greater  sacrifice.  Expiations, 
however  awful,  are  not  restitutions.  Expiations 
do  not  pay  damages.  Here  is  one  of  the  vast 
evils  resulting  from  the  Nation's  error  still  un- 
removed.  If  it  had  not  been  for  the  politi 
cal  complicity  of  millions  of  Northern  voters  we 
never  need  have  had  a  war,  and  slavery  must 


TO  SO UTHERN  SCHOOLS.  6 1 

have  perished  without  one.  I  think,  therefore, 
that  beyond  question,  the  removal  of  our  vast 
Southern  illiteracy  is  an  obligation  resting  upon 
the  whole  Nation,  yet  one  which  the  States  of 
the  North  and  West  cannot  meet  effectively 
except  through  the  action  of  the  National  Gov 
ernment. 

Let  national  aid  to  education  be  supplied  not 
as  a  national  condescension  or  charity,  but  as 
the  one  final  payment  of  a  national  obligation, 
so  regarded  by  payer  and  payee,  and  no  com 
munity  will  be  pauperized.  It  is  absurd  to  fear 
that  the  payment  of  a  just  debt,  and  its  payment 
in  education,  is  going  to  pauperize  a  community 
and  make  it  content  to  bring  up  the  next  gener 
ation  in  ignorance.  It  is  hardly  convincing  to 
draw  large  inferences  from  small  examples  in 
exceptional  _  communities,  as  has  been  done  too 
frequently  in  this  debate.  Our  whole  wide 
knowledge  of  human  history  and  human  nature 
makes  it  axiomatic,  that  a  free  and  educated 
generation  under  self-government  will  not  fail  to 
educate  its  children  at  its  own  cost. 

We  need  to  make  one  distinction  very  plain 
here — between  adults  and  children.  To  bestow 
a  professional  education  gratuitously  upon  an 
adult  certainly  does  have  some  tendency  to  pau 
perize  him,  for  it  puts  advantages  of  life  into  his 


62  NATIONAL  AID 

hands  at  a  lower  price  than  manhood  ought  to 
pay.     But  the  case  of  a  child  in  school  is  just 
the  reverse.     Under  gratuitous  aid  he  still  gets 
education  at  no  abatement  of  price  to  him,  but 
finds  himself,  instead,  filled  with  needs  which  call 
forth  his  finest    manhood  to  supply.     Let  the*) 
nation  pay  its  debt  of  public  education  to  South 
ern  illiteracy  in  one  generation  of  school  chil-J 
dren.     It  is  true  that  the  Southern  States  could 
do  more    for  public  education    if  they   would, 
and  he  is  no  friend  of  the  South  who  flatters  her 
people  into  the  delusion  that  they  are  doing  all 
they  can.   To  show  this,  one  need  only  compare 
these  States  with  the  new  States  and  Territories 
of  the  West,  where  the  people  invest  not  only 
much  more/^r  capita  of  school  population,  but 
a  very  much  larger  proportion  of  their  taxable 
wealth,  even  when  they  are  poorer  and  more  pre 
occupied  in  establishing  the  preliminary  frame 
work  of  society,  and  are  burdened  with  a  constant 
inflow  of  alien  immigrants.     In  short,  they  treat 
public  education  as  the  very  first  of  preferred 
claims.     But  the  supreme  fact  is  not   that  the  I 
South  is  or  is  not  doing  all  it  can  for  education.  * 
It  is  that  hundreds  and  thousands  of  children,! 
white  and  black,  as  the  result  of  the  nation's  ' 
crime,  of  which   they   are    only   the    innocent 
victims,  are  growing  up  in  an  ignorance  morei 


TO  SOUTHERN  SCHOOLS.  63 

pauperizing  than  education,  however  paid  for.  To 
those  who  rest  their  argument  against  national 
aid  upon  isolated  examples  in  an  exceptional 
State  here  and  there,  we  might  ask  one  question  : 
Which  are  the  paupers,  the  tens  of  thousands  y 
who  have  received  Northern  aid  and  even  remote 
individual  aid,  the  most  hazardous  of  all  aids,  or 
those  who  have  grown  up  in  ignorance  without 
it  ?  Is  it  not  the  fact  that  most  parts  of  the  v 
South  have  learned  the  value  and  applied  the 
lesson  of  public  education  from  the  aid,  gratui 
tous  as  to  them,  of  Northern  missionary  socie 
ties  ?  I  do  not  consider  the  education  of  the 
lower  masses  in  the  South  a  cure  for  all  the  ills 
of  Southern  society,  but  I  fail  to  see  how  they 
can  be  cured  without  it,  and  I  fail  to  see  any 
excellence  in  the  policy  that  is  content  to  with 
hold  it. 

But,  again,  our  national  scheme,  in  recognizing 
the  right  of  every  man  to  vote  as  a  necessary 
part  of  the  universal  right  of  self-government, 
forces  upon  us,  as  a  correspondingly  imperative 
public  necessity,  to  see  that  no  part  of  the  public 
mass  is  left  without  the  means  to  vote  intelli 
gently.  The  one  idea  stands  for  freedom,  the 
other  for  safety. 

I  am  not  of  those  who  consider  that  when  the 
nation  enfranchised  the  Negro  it  created  a  new 


64  NATIONAL  AID 

danger.  The  range  of  history,  even  within  our 
own  times,  gives  proof  enough  that  the  illiterate 
Negro  is  neither  as  dangerous  nor  as  much  feared 
enfranchised  as  he  was  enslaved.  But  I  do  insist 
that  enfranchisement — which  my  mind  emphati 
cally  approves — was  only  half  the  essential  na 
tional  provision  for  permanent  safety.  In  other 
words,  I  recognize  civil  freedom  as  an  element 
of  public  safety,  not  danger,  yet  an  inadequate 
element  demanding  the  establishment  and  main 
tenance  of  intelligence  to  complete  the  provision. 
To  pay  the  world  what  it  had  borrowed,  was 
one  part  of  the  nation's  obligation.  To  liberate 
bodily,  politically  and  civilly  the  slave,  was  and 
is  another.  There  are  others.  But  to  loose  the 
bonds  of  the  Negro's  ignorance  is  still  another. 
To  banquet,  toast  and  embrace  the  men  who 
conscientiously  fought  for  the  destruction  of  the 
Union  and  the  perpetuation  of  slavery  is  gener 
ous,  inspiring  and  largely  admirable;  but  it  pays 
no  part  of  the  national  debt  to  either  side;  and  I, 
sincerely  believe  that  North  and  South  would 
think  more  of  one  another  if  one  common,  noble  < 
sentiment  would  recognize  the  fact  that  feasting 
and  embracing  cannot  of  themselves  pay  the 
debts  of  either  party.  Let  us  have  the  banquet, 
by  all  means ;  but  let  us  have  the  wedding  first 
and  the  banquet  afterward. 


70  SOUTHERN  SCHOOLS.  65 

Whatever  we  say  with  regard  to  illiteracy  of 
blacks  in  the  South  applies  to  the  illiteracy  of 
whites  also,  since  they  are  both  the  fruit  of  the 
same  tree,  whose  root  drew  its  nourishment 
from  a  moral  error  as  wide  as  the  nation.  Let 
us  be  constitutional ;  but  I  think  no  reasonable 
mind  will  doubt  that  when  the  nation  recognizes 
this  matter  as  a  national  debt,  it  will  find  or  will 
make  a  constitutional  way  to  mend  it. 

We  are  told  by  the  opponents  of  national  aid 
to  education  that  it  would  incur  the  risk  of  pau 
perizing  the  communities  aided ;  but  surely  we 
cannot  run  a  more  glaring  risk  than  to  go  on 
leaving  the  reduction  of  an  enormous  mass  of 
illiteracy  to  communities  that  believe  themselves, 
and  are  widely  believed,  to  be  doing  all  they  can, 
while  they  are  hardly  performing  half  the  entire 
bulk  of  the  task.  There  is  not  in  the  range  of 
our  choice  any  condition  or  possible  attitude  free 
from  risks,  and  the  maxim  is  as  true  in  politics 
and  government  as  in  commerce  and  finance — 
"  Nothing  venture,  nothing  have."  Another 
maxim  is  to  the  point,  that "  Forewarned  is  fore 
armed."  And  certainly  all  hazards  in  national 
aid  would  be  reduced  to  trivial  proportions  when 
made  conditional  upon  at  least  the  full  mainte 
nance  of  the  present  degree  of  self-help  supplied 
by  the  States  themselves. 
6 


WHAT  SHALL  THE  NEGRO  DO? 

I.  This  paper  is  addressed  directly  to  the  col 
ored  people  of  the  United  States.  A  large  mass 
of  them,  of  course,  will  not  see  it ;  yet  others  of 
them  will.  Nothing  more  forcibly  illustrates  the 
great  progress  of  our  times  than  the  fact  that 
already  one  may  safely  count  on  reaching  a  con 
siderable  body  of  readers,  wholly  or  partly  of 
Negro  blood,  through  the  pages  of  a  monthly 
publication  adapted  to  the  highest  popular  intel 
ligence  of  the  Anglo-Saxon  race.  The  explana 
tion  of  this  is,  that  although  the  colored  man  in 
America  enters  the  second  quarter-century  of  his 
emancipation  without  yet  having  attained  the 
full  measure  of  American  freedom  decreed  to 
him,  he  has,  nevertheless,  enjoyed,  for  at  least 
twenty  years,  a  larger  share  of  private,  public,  re 
ligious  and  political  liberty  than  falls  to  the  lot  of 
any  but  a  few  peoples — the  freest  in  the  world. 

It  would  be  far  from  the  truth  to  say  that  other 
men  everywhere,  or  even  that  all  white  men,  are 
freer  than  he.  No  subject  of  the  Czar,  be  he 
peasant  or  prince,  however  rich  in  privileges, 
dares  claim  the  rights  actually  enjoyed  by  an 
American  freedman.  The  Negro's  grievance  is 
66 


WHAT  SHALL   THE  NEGRO  DO?  67 

not  that  his  liberties  are  few ;  it  is  that,  in  a  land 
and  nation  whose  measure  of  every  man's  free 
dom  is  all  the  freedom  any  one  can  attain  with 
out  infringing  upon  a  like  freedom  in  others,  and 
where  all  the  competitions  of  life  are  keyed  on 
this  idea,  his  tenure  of  almost  every  public  right 
is  somehow  mutilated  by  arbitrary  discrimina-' 
tions  against  him.  Not  that  he  is  in  slave's 
shackles  and  between  prison  walls,  or  in  a  Rus 
sian's  danger  of  them,  but  that,  being  entered  ^ 
in  the  race  for  the  prize  of  American  citizen 
ship,  in  accordance  with  all  the  rules  of  the 
course,  and  being  eager  to  run,  heisjRrstjdg.-^.-* 
clared  an  inferior  competitor,  and  then,  without 
ga^ri  to  any7But  with  only  loss  to  all,  is  handi 
capped  and  hobbled. 

Without  gain  to  any  and  with  loss  to  all.  For 
in  this  contest  no  one  truly  wins  by  another's 
loss ;  no  one  need  lose  by  another's  gain ;  the 
prize  is  for  every  one  that  reaches  the  goal,  and 
the  more  winners  there  are  the  better  for  each 
and  all.  The  better  public  citizen  the  Negro 
can  be  the  better  it  will  be  for  the  white  man. 
But  the  Negro's  grievance  is,  that  the  discrimina 
tions  made  against  him  are  more  and  more  un 
bearable  the  better  public  citizen  he  is  or  tries  to 
be ;  that  they  are  impediments,  not  to  the  grovel- 
ings  of  his  lower  nature,  but  to  the  aspirations 


68  WHAT  SHALL  THE  NEGRO  DO? 

of  his  higher ;  that  as  long  as  he  is  content  to 
travel  and  lodge  as  a  ragamuffin,  frequent  the 
vilest  places  of  amusement,  laze  about  the  streets, 
shun  the  public  library  and  the  best  churches 
and  colleges,  and  neglect  every  political  duty  of 
his  citizenship,  no  white  man  could  be  much 
freer  than  he  finds  himself;  but  that  the  farther 
he  rises  above  such  life  as  this  the  more  he  is  \ 
galled  and  tormented  with  ignominious  dis 
criminations  made  against  him  as  a  public  citi 
zen,  both  by  custom  and  by  law ;  and  finally, 
that  as  to  his  mother,  his  wife,  his  sister,  his 
daughter,  these  encouragements  to  ignoble,  and 
discouragements  to  nobler,  life  are  only  crueler 
in  their  case  than  in  his  own. 

2.  What  large  enjoyment  of  rights,  with  what 
strange  suffering  of  wrongs  !  Yet  to  explain 
the  incongruity  is  easy;  the  large  enjoyment  of 
rights  belongs  to  a  new  order  of  things,  which 
has  only  partly  driven  out  the  old  order,  of 
which  these  wrongs  are,  by  comparison,  but  a 
slender  remnant.  To  explain  is  easy,  but  to  re 
move,  to  remove  these  sad  and  profitless  wrongs, 
what  shall  the  nation  do  ? 

There  are  many  answers.  We  are  reminded 
of  what  the  nation  has  done,  and  the  record  is 
a  great  one.  For  forty  years  of  this  nineteenth 
century,  one  of  whose  years  counts  for  a  score 


WHA T  SHA L L   THE  NE GRO  DO ?  69 

of  any  other  century's,  it  made  the  condition  of 
the  Negro  the  absorbing  national  question,  to 
which  it  sacrificed  its  peace  and  repose.  Admit 
ting  much  intermixture  of  motives  of  selfish 
power  and  of  self-preservation,  yet  the  funda 
mental  matter  \vas  a  moral  conviction  that  moved 
the  majority  of  the  nation  to  refuse  to  hold  slaves 
or  countenance  slave-holding  by  State  legisla 
tion.  To  have  waived  this  conviction  would  have 
avoided  a  frightful  civil  war.  The  freedom  of  -f 
the  Negro  was  bought  at  a  higher  price,  in  white 
men's  blood  and  treasure,  than  any  people  ever 
paid,  of  their  own  blood  and  treasure,  for  their 
own  liberty.  Since  the  close  of  the  war,  many  >+- 
millions  of  dollars  have  been  spent  by  private 
benevolence  in  the  North  to  qualify  the  Southern 
Negro,  morally  and  intellectually,  for  his  new 
freedom,  and  the  outlay  continues  still  undimin- 
ished.  No  equal  number  of  people  elsewhere  on 
earth  receives  so  great  an  amount  of  missionary 
educational  aid.  In  the  South  itself  a  great  change 
has  taken — is  taking — place  in  popular  senti 
ment  concerning  certain  aspects  of  the  Negro's 
case.  In  1885-86  over  58  per  cent,  of  the  col-  v 
ored  school  population  in  seven  great  Southern 
States  were  enrolled  in  State  public  schools,  in 
recognition  of  the  necessity  and  advantage  of 
the  Negro's  elevation. 


70  WHAT  SHALL   THE  NEGRO  DO? 

These  things  are  not  enumerated  to  remind 
the  Negro  of  his  obligations.  His  property,  as 
far  as  it  goes,  is  taxed  equally  with  the  white 
man's  for  public  education  and  the  maintenance 
of  the  State;  and  all  the  benefactions  he  has 
received,  added  to  all  the  peculations  of  which 
he  stood  accused  in  the  days  of  his  own  misrule, 
are  not  yet  equal  to  the  just  dues  of  a  darker 
past  still  remaining,  and  that  must  ever  remain, 
unpaid  to  him.  They  are  enumerated  not  to 
exhaust  the  record,  but  merely  to  indicate  the 
range  of  what  has  been  done  in  the  past,  and  is 
being  done  in  the  present,  by  white  men  concern 
ing  the  Negro's  rights  and  wrongs.  The  great 
national  political  party  that  first  rose  to  power, 
and  for  almost  a  quarter  of  a  century  held  gov 
ernmental  control,  by  its  espousal  and  main 
tenance  of  the  Negro's  cause,  still  declares  that 
cause  a  living  issue  in  the  national  interest.  The 
great  party  now  in  power,*  with  one  or  more  dis 
affected  wings  from  the  opposition,  though  it 
does  not  propose  to  do  anything,  as  to  the  Negro, 
that  has  thus  far  been  left  undone,  at  least  con 
sents  not  to  undo  anything  that  has  been  done. 
Yet  other  important  issues  have  been  pushed  to 
the  front  by  both  parties,  and  the  "  Negro  ques- 

*  The  Democratic  Party,  1887, 


WHAT  SHALL   THE  NEGRO  DO?  71 

tion,"  however  preeminent  in  the  nation's  true 
interest,  is  not  paramount  in  the  public  atten 
tion. 

But  what  has  the  Negro  done  ?  What  is  he 
doing?  The  trite  answer  is,  that  he  has  in-  . 
creased  from  four  millions  to  seven,  and  is  still 
multiplying  faster  by  natural  increase  than  any 
other  race  on  the  continent.  But,  also,  he  has 
accepted  his  freedom  in  the  spirit  of  those  who 
bestowed  it ;  that  is,  limited  by,  and  only  by,  the 
civil  and  political  rights  and  duties  of  American 
citizenship  equally  devoid  of  special  privileges 
and  special  restrictions.  He  fought  in  no  mean 
numbers  in  the  great  army  that  achieved  his 
liberation,  and  he  has  laid  down,  since  then, 
many  a  life  rather  than  waive  the  rights  guaran 
teed  to  him  by  the  American  Constitution.  In 
the  infancy  of  his  citizenship,  steeped  in  moral 
and  intellectual  ignorance,  with  some  of  his 
former  masters  disfranchised  and  the  rest  op 
posed  to  almost  the  whole  list  of  his  civil  rights, 
he  fell  into  the  arms  of  unscrupulous  leaders  and 
covered  not  a  few  pages  of  history  with  a  record 
of  atrociously  corrupt  government ;  yet,  as  the 
present  writer  has  lately  asserted  elsewhere,  the 
freedman  never  by  legislation  removed  the  penal 
ties  from  anything  that  the  world  at  large  calls  a 
crime,  and  here  it  may  be  added  that  he  never 


72  WHAT  SHALL   THE  NEGRO  DO? 

put  upon  the  statute  book  a  law  hostile  to  the 
universal  enjoyment  of  American  liberty.  In 
the  darkest  day  of  his  power  he  established  the 
public  school  system.  He  has  exceeded  expec 
tation  in  his  display  of  industry,  his  purchase  of 
land,  his  accumulation  of  wealth,  his  eagerness 
and  capability  for  education,  and  even  in  his  po 
litical  intelligence  and  parliamentary  skill.  Even  i 
under  the  artificial  and  undiscriminating  pressure 
of  public  caste  he  is  developing  social  ranks  with 
wide  moral  and  intellectual  differences,  from  the 
stupid,  idle,  criminal,  and  painfully  numerous 
minority  at  the  bottom,  to  a  wealth-holding,  edu 
cated  minority  at  the  top  ;  each  emerging,  or  half 
emerging,  from  a  huge  middle  majority  of  peace 
keeping,  but  uneducated  and  unskilled  farmers, 
mechanics,  and  laborers,  yet  a  majority  un- 
estranged  from  the  more  cultured  and  prosperous 
minority  of  their  own  race  by  any  differences  of 
religion,  conflict  of  traditions,  or  rivalry  of  capi 
tal  and  labor,  and  hearkening  to  their  counsels 
more  tractably  than  the  mass  listens  to  the  few 
among  any  other  people  on  the  continent.  He  x 
is  not  open  to  the  charges  urged  against  the 
Indian  or  the  Chinamen ;  he  does  not  choose  to 
be  a  savage,  as  the  one,  nor  a  civil  alien  and  a 
heathen,  as  the  other,  is  supposed  to  choose. 
He  accepts  education,  sometimes  under  offensive, 


WHAT  SHALL   THE  NEGRO  DO?  ?$ 

and  sometimes  under  expensive,  conditions  He_ 
proposes  to  stay  in  this  country,  and  is  eager  to 
be  in  all  things  a  citizen.  His  religion  is  Christi 
anity  ;  and  if  it  is  often  glaringly  emotional  and 
superficial,  so,  confessedly,  is  the  Christianity  of 
his  betters  the  world  over.  He  only  shares  the 
fault,  after  all,  in  large  and  gross  degree,  amply 
explained  by  his  past  and  present  conditions; 
and  in  many  leading  features  a  description  of  his 
faith  and  practice,  worship  and  works,  would 
differ  but  little  from  the  history  of  religion 
among  our  white  settlers  of  the  Mississippi  Val 
ley  scarcely  seventy-five  years  ago. 

3.  Thus  far  has  the  nation  come,  and  in  view 
of  these  developments  the  old  but  still  anxious 
question,  What  shall  be  done  with  the  Negro  ? 
makes  room  beside  it  for  this :  What  shall  the 
Negro  do  ?  For,  as  matters  stand,  it  seems 
only  too  probable  that  until  the  Negro  does 
something  further,  nothing  further  will  be  done. 
And,  indeed,  are  not  the  times  and  the  question 
saying,  themselves,  by  mute  signs,  that  the  day 
has  come  when  the  Negro,  not  the  rice-field  sav 
age,  but  you,  the  educated,  the  law-abiding,  tax- 
paying  Negro,  must  push  more  strenuously  to  the 
front  in  his — in  your — own  behalf,  and  thus  in  the 
behalf  of  all  your  race  in  the  land  ?  In  partic 
ular,  then,  What  can — what  shall — the  Negro  do  ? 


74  WHAT  SHALL    THE  NEGRO  DO? 

You  can  make  the  most  of  the  liberty  you 
have.  You  have  large  liberty  of  speech,  much 
freedom  of  the  press,  of  petition,  of  organization, 
of  public  meeting,  liberty  to  hold  property,  to 
prosecute  civil  and  criminal  lawsuits,  a  perfect 
freedom  to  use  the  mails,  and  a  certain — or  must 
we  say  an  uncertain — freedom  of  the  ballot.  All 
these  are  inestimable  liberties,  and  have  been, 
and  are  being,  used  by  you.  But  are  they  being 
used  faithfully  to  their  utmost  extent? 

Freedom  of  public  organization,  for  instance. 
From  the  earliest  days  of  his  emancipation  the 
Negro  has  shown  a  zest  and  gift  for  organiza 
tion,  and  to-day  his  private,  public,  and  secret 
societies,  which  cost  him  money  to  maintain, 
have  thousands  of  members.  Yet  only  here  and 
there  among  them  is  there  a  club  or  league  for 
the  advocacy  and  promotion  of  his  civil  rights. 
There  is  probably  no  other  great  national  ques 
tion  so  nearly  destitute  of  the  championship  of 
an  active  national  organization,  with  officers, 
treasury,  and  legal  counsel.  The  causes  of  this 
are  plain  enough.  As  long  as  it  was  the  supreme 
political  issue  it  was  left,  after  our  American 
fashion,  entirely  to  the  heated  treatment  of  the 
daily  press,  the  stump,  and  the  national  and 
State  legislatures.  From  them  a  large  part 
of  the  question  passed  into  a  long  period  of 


WHAT  SHALL  THE  NEGRO  DO?  75 

suspense  in  the  Supreme  Court.  Only  the 
matter  of  casting  and  counting  votes  kept,  and 
keeps,  the  attention  of  parties,  and  this  with  a 
constant  loss  of  power,  showing  that  partisan 
treatment  is  no  longer  the  question's  only  or 
chief  need. 

In  the  politics  of  a  great  nation  even  the  great 
est  questions  must  take  their  turns,  according  as 
now  one  and  now  another  gains  the  lead  in  the 
public  attention,  and  the  more  sagaciously  and 
diligently  any  worthy  question  is  pressed  to  the 
front  by  the  forces  that  dictate  to  the  daily  press, 
the  stump,  and  the  national  and  State  legisla 
tures,  the  sooner  and  oftener  will  its  turn  come 
round  to  lay  uppermost  hold  upon  the  national 
conscience  and  policy.  There  always  was  good 
reason,  but  now  there  is  the  greatest  need,  that 
you  give  and  get  this  kind  of  backing  for  the 
question  of  your  civil  and  political  rights.  We 
say  give  and  get,  because  every  endeavor  should 
be  used  to  secure  by  personal  solicitation  not  the 
condescension — there  has  been  enough  of  that — 
but  the  friendly  countenance  and  active  coopera 
tion  of  white  men  well  known  in  their  communi 
ties  for  intelligence  and  integrity.  A  certain  local 
civil  rights  club  of  colored  men  that  had  thought 
this  impracticable  at  length  tried  it,  and  soon 
numbered  amoncr  its  active  members  some  of  the 


?  WHAT  SHALL  THE  NEGRO  DO? 

best  white  citizens  of  its  town.  And  naturally, 
for  it  declared  only  such  aims  as  any  good  citizen 
ought  gladly  to  encourage  and  aid  any  other  to 
seek  by  all  lawful  means.* 

You  can  as  urgently  claim  the  liberty  to  per 
form  all  your  civil  duties  as  the  liberty  to  enjoy 
all  your  civil  rights.  The  two  must  be  sought 
at  the  same  time  and  by  the  same  methods. 
They  should  never  be  divided.  You  must  feel 
and  declare  yourself  no  longer  the  nation's,  much 
less  any  political  party's,  still  less  your  old  mas 
ter's,  mere  nursling;  but  one  bound  by  the 
duties  of  citizenship  to  study,  and  actively  to 
seek,  all  men's  rights,  and  the  public  welfare  of 

*  After  stating  that  any  adult  male  citizen  of  the  United  States 
may  become  a  member,  it  declares  its  object  to  be  "  to  foster  and 
promote,  by  every  lawful  use  of  the  pen,  the  press,  the  mails,  the 
laws,  and  the  courts,  by  public  assemblage  and  petition,  and  by  all 
proper  stimulation  of  public  sentiment :  I.  Both  the  legal  and 
the  conventional  recognition,  establishment,  and  protection  of  all 
men  in  the  common  rights  of  humanity  and  of  all  citizens  of  the 
United  States  in  the  full  enjoyment  of  every  civil  right,  without 
distinction  on  account  of  birth,  race,  or  private  social  status.  2. 
The  like  recognition  of  every  man's  inviolable  right  to  select  and 
reject  his  social  companions  and  acquaintances  according  to  his 
own  private  pleasure  and  conscience,  limited  in  the  family  rela 
tionship  only  by  laws  made  under  the  full  enjoyment  of  equal 
civil  rights  throughout  the  whole  community  coming  under  such 
laws ;  and  in  the  social  circle  only  by  the  same  inviolable  right 
in  others." 


WHAT  SHALL   THE  NEGRO  DO?  JJ 

the  nation,  and  of  every  lesser  community — 
State,  county,  city,  village — to  which  he  belongs. 
Nothing  else  can  so  hasten  the  acquisition  of  all 
your  rights  as  for  you  to  make  it  plain  that  your 
own  rights  and  welfare  are  not  all  you  are  striv 
ing  for,  but  that  you  are,  at  least  equally  with 
the  white  man,  the  student  of  your  individual 
duty  toward  every  public  question  in  the  light 
of  the  general  good. 

Holding  this  attitude,  you  can  make  many 
things  clear,  concerning  the  cause  of  civil  rights, 
that  greatly  need  to  be  made  so.  For  instance, 
that  this  cause  is  not  merely  yours,  but  is  a  great 
fundamental  necessity  of  all  free  government, 
in  which  every  American  citizen  is  interested, 
knowing  that  they  who  neglect  to  defend  any 
principle  of  liberty  may  well  expect  to  lose  its 
substance. 

Or,  for  another  instance,  that  the  demand  for 
equal  civil,  including  political,  rights  is  by  no 
means  a  demand  for  supremacy,  much  less  for 
the  supremacy  of  one  race  over  another. 

Or,  again,  that  this  demand  is  not  for  a  share 
in  the  popular  power  by  a  mass  knowing  and 
caring  nothing  about  the  popular  welfare. 

Or,  yet  again,  that  it  is  not  the  demand  of  an 
irresponsible  herd  deaf  to  the  counsels  of  its 
own  intelligent  few  and  of  any  other. 


78  WHAT  SHALL   THE  NEGRO  DO? 

Or,  that  the  demand  for  equal  unpolitical  civil 
rights  is  not  a  demand  that  public  indecency  and 
unrespectability  shall  enjoy  all  the  rights  of  de 
cency  and  respectability,  but  that  mere  color  be 
not  made  the  standard  of  public  decency  and 
respectability. 

Or,  that  equality  in  these  unpolitical  civil 
rights  is  urged,  not  for  the  difference  in  comfort, 
but  for  the  effect  upon  the  inward  character  of 
those  qualified  to  enjoy  it,  and  for  its  power  to 
awaken,  even  in  those  yet  without  them,  aspira 
tions  that  should  not  be  lacking  in  the  mind  of 
any  citizen. 

Or,  lastly,  you  can  make  it  clear  that  the 
Negro  is  not  the  morally  and  mentally  nerve 
less  infant  he  was  fifteen  years  ago. 

But  there  is  a  negative  side  to  what  the  Negro 
may  do. 

4.  You  can  proclaim  what  you  do  not  want. 
We  have  already  implied  this  in  what  goes  just 
before.  There  are  tens  of  thousands  of  intelli 
gent  people  who  to-day  unwittingly  exaggerate 
the  demands  made  by  and  in  behalf  of  the  Negro 
into  a  vast  and  shapeless  terror.  Neither  he,  his 
advocates,  nor  his  opponents  have  generally 
realized  how  widely  his  claims  have  been,  some 
times  by  and  sometimes  without  intention,  mis 
construed.  He  needs  still  to  make  innumerable 


WHAT  SHALL  THE  NEGRO  DO?  79 

reiterations  of  facts  that  seem  to  him  too  plain 
for  repetition ;  as,  for  example,  that  he  does  not 
want  "  Negro  supremacy,"  or  any  supremacy 
save  that  of  an  intelligent  and  upright  minority, 
be  it  white,  black  or  both,  ruling,  out  of  office, 
by  the  sagacity  of  their  counsels  and  their 
loyalty  to  the  common  good,  and  in  office  by 
the  choice  of  the  majority  of  the  whole  people  ; 
that,  as  to  private  society,  he  does  not  want  any 
man's  company  who  does  not  want  his ;  or  that, 
as  to  suffrage,  he  does  not  want  to  vote  solidly, 
unless  he  must  in  order  to  maintain  precious 
rights  and  duties  denied  to,  and  only  to,  him 
and  all  his. 

There  is  another  thing  which  the  Negro  must 
learn  to  say,  and  feel,  that  he  does  not  want.  It 
is  hard  for  a  white  man  to  name  it,  for  it  is  prin 
cipally  the  fault  of  white  men  that  it  is  hard  for 
the  Negro  to  say  it.  It  is  our — the  white  man's 
— fault  that  the  only  even  partial  outlet  for  the 
colored  man  from  a  menial  public  status,  in  the 
eyes  of  the  white  man,  is  political  office.  Even 
when  he  attains  a  learned  profession  he  attains 
no  such  consideration  as  he  gains  in  political 
office,  superficial  and  tawdry  though  it  be.  Yet, 
self-regard  has  grown  ;  scholarly  callings  win  for 
him  more  and  more  regard  from  both  whites  and 
blacks ;  in  the  whole  national  mind  the  idea  has 


80  WHA  T  SHALL  THE  NEGRO  DO  ? 

wonderfully  grown — scarcely  current  at  all  when 
the  Negro  began  his  political  life — that  public 
office  is  not  the  legitimate  spoils  of  party  and 
the  legitimate  reward  of  mere  partisan  loyalty 
and  activity,  to  be  apportioned,  pro  rata,  to  each 
and  every  race,  class,  and  clique  among  the  par 
tisan  victors ;  and  the  time  has  come  when  the 
Negro,  for  his  own  interest,  must  learn  to  say : 
"  My  full  measure  of  citizenship  I  must  and  will 
have;  but  I  yield  no  right  of  public  office  or 
emolument  to  any  man  because  he  is  white,  nor 
claim  any  because  I  am  black ;  and  I  do  not 
want  any  office  that  does  not  want  me."  Such 
an  attitude  will  win  better  rewards  than  the 
keeping  of  doors  and  sweeping  of  corridors. 

But  it  is  equally  important  to  say  that  there 
are  other  things  for  the  Negro  to  do  that  must 
by  no  means  be  either  negative  or  passive. 

5.  You  must  keep  your  vote  alive.  This  means 
several  things.  It  means  that,  without  venality 
or  servility,  you  must  hold  your  vote  up  for  the 
honorable  competitive  bid  of  political  parties.  A 
vote  which  one  party  can  count  on,  as  a  matter 
of  course,  and  the  opposite  party  cannot  hope  to 
win  at  any  price,  need  expect  nothing  from  either. 
In  no  campaign  ought  the  Negro  to  know  cer 
tainly  how  he  will  vote  before  he  has  seen  both 
platforms  and  weighed  the  chances  of  their 


WHAT  SHALL  THE  NEGRO  DO?  8 1 

words  being  made  good.  You  will  never  get 
your  rights  until  the  white  man  does  not  know 
how  you  are  going  to  vote.  You  must  let  him 
see  that  the  "  Negro  vote  "  can  divide  whenever 
it  may,  and  come  together  solidly  again  when 
ever  it  must. 

Keeping  your  vote  alive  means,  also,  that 
while  to  be  grateful  is  right  and  to  be  ungrateful 
is  base,  you  must  nevertheless  stop  voting  for 
gratitude.  The  debts  of  gratitude  are  sacred, 
but  no  unwise  vote  can  lighten  them.  A  vote 
is  not  a  free-will  offering  to  the  past;  it  is  a 
debt  to  the  present. 

Again,  keeping  your  vote  alive  means  voting 
on  all  questions.  What  makes  great  parties  if 
it  be  not  the  combination  of  men  of  various 
political  interests  consenting  to  concern  them 
selves  in  one  another's  aims  and  claims  for  the 
better  promotion  of  those  designs  in  the  order 
of  their  urgency  and  practicability  ?  Now,  here 
is  the  Negro  charged,  at  least,  with  rarely — almost 
never — making  himself  seen  or  heard  in  any  wide 
spread  interest  except  his  own.  Small  wonder 
if  other  men  do  not  more  hotly  insist  upon  his 
vote  being  cast  and  counted.  The  Negro  may 
be  not  the  first  or  principal  one  to  blame  in  this 
matter,  but  he  is  largely  the  largest  loser. 

Last,  keeping  the  vote  alive  means  casting  it. 
7 


82  WHAT  SHALL   THE  NEGRO  DO? 

You  must  vote.  You  must  practically  recognize 
two  facts,  which  if  white  men  had  not  recognized 
in  their  own  case  long  ago,  you  would  be  in 
slavery  still  to-day :  that  there  is  an  enormous 
value  in  having  votes  cast ;  first,  even  though 
they  cannot  win;  and,  secondly,  even  though 
they  are  not  going  to  be  counted.  A  good 
cause  and  a  stubborn  fight  are  a  combination 
almost  as  good  as  victory  itself;  better  than  vic 
tory  without  them ;  the  seed  of  certain  victory 
at  last.  Even  if  you  have  to  cope  with  fraud, 
make  it  play  its  infamous  part  so  boldly  and  so 
fast  that  it  shall  work  its  own  disgrace  and  destruc 
tion,  as  many  a  time  it  has  done  before  negroes 
ever  voted.  Vote !  Cast  your  vote  though 
taxed  for  it.  Cast  your  vote  though  defrauded 
of  it,  as  many  a  white  man  is  to-day.  Cast  your 
vote  though  you  die  for  it.  Let  no  man  cry, 
"Liberty  or  blood;"  leave  that  for  Socialists 
and  Parisian  mobs ;  but  when  liberty  means  duty, 
and  death  means  one's  own  extinction,  then  the 
cry  of  "  Liberty  or  death  "  is  a  holy  cry,  and  the 
man  who  will  not  make  it  his  own,  even  in  free 
dom  is  not  free.  Seek  not  to  buy  liberty  with 
the  blood  either  of  friends  or  of  enemies ;  it  is 
only  men's  own  blood  at  last  that  counts  in  the 
purchase  of  liberty.  Whatever  may  have  been 
the  true  philosophy  for  more  ferocious  times, 


WHAT  SHALL  THE  NEGRO  DO?  83 

this  is  the  true  philosophy  for  ours.  Cast  your 
votes,  then,  even  though  many  of  you  die  for  it. 
Some  of  you  have  died,  but  in  comparison  how  few; 
three  hundred  thousand  white  men  poured  out 
their  blood  to  keep  you  bound,  other  three  hun 
dred  thousand  died  to  set  you  free,  and  still  the 
full  measure  of  American  freedom  is  not  yours. 
A  fiftieth  as  much  of  your  own  blood  shed  in  the 
inoffensive  activities  of  public  duty  will  buy  it. 
Keep  your  vote  alive;  better  nine  free  men  than 
ten  half  free.  In  most  of  the  Southern  States 
the  negro  vote  has  been  diminishing  steadily  for 
years,  to  the  profound  satisfaction  of  those  white 
men  whose  suicidal  policy  is  to  keep  you  in  alien 
ism.  In  the  name  of  the  dead,  black  and  white, 
of  the  living,  and  of  your  children  yet  unborn, 
not  as  of  one  party  or  another,  but  as  American 
freemen,  vote !  For  in  this  free  land  the  people 
that  do  not  vote  do  not  get  and  do  not  deserve 
their  rights. 

6.  And  you  must  spend  your  own  money.  No 
full  use  of  the  liberties  you  now  have  can  be  made 
without  cooperation,  however  loose  that  coopera 
tion  may  have  to  be ;  and  no  cooperation  can  be 
very  wide,  active,  or  effective  without  the  use  of 
money.  This  tax  cannot  be  laid  anywhere 
upon  a  few  purses.  Falling  upon  many,  it  will 
rest  too  lightly  to  be  counted  a  burden.  White 


84  WHAT  SHALL  THE  NEGRO  DO? 

men  may  and  should  help  to  bear  it ;  but  if  so, 
then  all  the  more  the  Negro  must  spend  his  own 
money.  Half  the  amount  now  idled  away  on 
comparatively  useless  societies  and  secret  orders 
will  work  wonders. 

Money  is  essential,  especially  for  two  matters. 
First,  for  the  stimulation,  publication,  and  wide 
distribution  of  a  literature  of  the  facts,  equities, 
and  exigencies  of  the  negro  question  in  all  its 
practical  phases.  This  would  naturally  include 
a  constant  and  diligent  keeping  of  the  whole 
question  pruned  clear  of  its  dead  matter.  From 
nothing  else  has  the  question  suffered  so  much,  at 
the  hands  both  of  friends  and  of  foes,  as  from  lack 
of  this  kind  of  attention.  And,  secondly,  money 
is  essential  for  the  unofficial,  unpartisan,  prompt, 
and  thorough  investigation  and  exposure  of 
crimes  against  civil  and  political  rights. 

You  must  press  the  contest  for  equal  civil 
rights  and  duties  in  your  separate  States.  The 
claim  need  by  no  means  be  abated  that  the  na 
tional  government  has  rights  and  duties  in  the 
matter  that  have  not  yet  been  fully  established ; 
but  for  all  that  you  can  urge  the  question's  recog 
nition  in  State  political  platforms,  and,  having 
made  your  vote  truly  and  honorably  valuable  to 
all  parties,  can  bestow  it  where  there  is  largest 
prospect  of  such  recognition  being  carried  into 


WHAT  SHALL  THE  NEGRO  DO?  85 

legislation  and  such  legislation  being  carried  into 
effect. 

There  is  a  strong  line  of  cleavage  already  run 
ning  through  the  white  part  of  the  population  in 
every  Southern  State.  On  one  side  of  this  line 
the  trend  of  conviction  is  toward  the  establish 
ment  of  the  common  happiness  and  security 
through  the  uplifting  of  the  whole  people  by  the 
widest  possible  distribution  of  moral  effects  and 
wealth-producing  powers.  It  favors,  for  exam 
ple,  the  expansion  of  the  public-school  system, 
and  is  strongest  among  men  of  professional  call 
ings  and  within  sweep  of  the  influence  of  colleges 
and  universities.  It  antagonizes  such  peculiar 
institutions  as  the  infamous  convict-lease  system, 
with  that  system's  enormous  political  powers. 
It  condemns  corrupt  elections  at  home  or  abroad. 
It  revolts  against  the  absolutism  of  political  par 
ties.  In  a  word,  it  stands  distinctively  for  the 
New  South  of  American  ideas,  including  the  idea 
of  material  development,  as  against  a  New  South 
with  no  ideas  except  that  of  material  develop 
ment  for  the  aggrandizement  of  the  few,  and  the 
holding  of  the  whole  Negro  race  in  the  South  to 
a  servile  public  status,  cost  what  it  may  to  justice, 
wealth,  or  morals.  Let  the  Negro,  in  every  State 
and  local  issue,  strive  with  a  dauntless  persever 
ance  intelligently,  justly,  and  honorably  to  make 


86  WHAT  SHALL   THE  NEGRO  DO  ? 

his  vote  at  once  too  cheap  and  too  valuable  for 
the  friends  of  justice  and  a  common  freedom  to 
despise  it  or  allow  their  enemies  to  suppress  it. 
Remember,  your  power  in  the  nation  at  large 
must  always  be  measured  almost  entirely  by  your 
power  in  your  own  State. 

And,  finally,  you  must  see  the  power  and  ne-  V 
cessity  of  individual  thought  and  action.  It  is 
perfectly  natural  that  the  Negro,  his  history  being 
what  it  is,  should  magnify  the  necessity  of  cooper 
ating  in  multitudinous  numbers  to  effect  any  pub 
lic  result.  He  has  not  only  been  treated,  but  has 
treated  himself  too  much,  as  a  mere  mass.  While 
he  has  too  often  lacked  in  his  organized  efforts 
that  disinterested  zeal,  or  even  that  semblance  of 
it  which  far-sighted  shrewdness  puts  on,  to  insure 
wide  and  harmonious  cooperation,  he  has,  on  the 
other  hand,  overlooked  the  power  of  the  indi 
vidual  and  the  necessity  of  individual  power  to 
give  power  to  numbers. 

You  rightly  think  it  atrocious  that  you  should 
lose  your  vote  by  its  fraudulent  suppression. 
But  what  can  your  vote  when  counted  procure 
you  ?  Legislation  ?  Probably.  But  what  can 
legislation  procure  you  if  it  is  contrary  to  public 
sentiment  ?  And  how  are  public  sentiment  and 
action,  in  the  main,  shaped  ?  By  the  supremacy 
of  individual  minds;  by  the  powers  of  intellect, 


WHAT  SHALL   THE  NEGRO  DO?  S/ 

will,  argument,  and  persuasion  vested  by  nature 
in  a  few  individuals  here  and  there,  holding  no 
other  commission  but  these  powers,  and  every 
such  individual  worth  from  a  hundred  to  a  hun 
dred  thousand  votes.  Without  this  element  and 
without  its  recognition  there  is  little  effective 
power  even  in  organized  masses.  Do  not  wait 
for  the  mass  to  move.  The  mass  waits  for  the 
movement  of  that  individual  who  cannot  and  will 
not  wait  for  the  mass.  You  may  believe  your 
powers  to  be,  or  they  may  actually  be,  humble  ; 
but  even  so,  there  are  all  degrees  of  leadership 
and  need  of  all  degrees.  There  is  work  to  be  done 
which  it  is  not  in  the  nature  of  violence  or  votes 
or  any  mere  mass  power,  organized  or  unorgan 
ized,  to  accomplish. 

An  attempt  has  been  made  here  to  enumerate 
a  few  of  its  prominent  features.  They  are  things 
that  the  Negro  can  do  so  profitably  and  honora 
bly  to  all,  of  whatever  race,  class,  or  region, 
that  no  white  citizen  can  justly  refuse  his  public, 
active  cooperation.  The  times  demand  these 
things.  The  changes  already  going  on  in  the 
South  are  just  what  call  for  promptness  and 
vigor  in  this  work,  for  they  mark  the  supreme 
opportunity  that  lies  in  a  formative  stage  of  pub 
lic  affairs.  What  will  the  Negro  do  ? 


A  SIMPLER  SOUTHERN  QUESTION. 

I.  To  bring  any  public  question  fairly  into  the 
open  field  of  literary  debate  is  always  a  long 
step  toward  its  final  adjustment.  It  is  across 
that  field  that  the  question  must  go  to  be  so 
purged  of  its  irrelevancies,  misinterpretations, 
and  misuses,  personal,  partisan,  or  illogical,  and 
so  clarified  and  simplified,  as  to  make  it  easy  for 
the  popular  mind  to  take  practical  and  final  action 
on  it  and  settle  it  once  for  all  by  settling  it  right. 

It  is  in  this  field  that  the  Negro  problem  still 
forces  itself  to  the  front  as  a  living  and  urgent 
national  question.  Such  distinguished  and  hon 
ored  men  as  Messrs.  Hampton,  Chandler,  Col- 
quitt,  Foraker,  Halstead,  Edmunds,  and  Watter- 
son  are  engaged  in  its  debate,  and  in  the  October 
(1888)  number  of  the  Forum  Senator  Eustis  writes 
that  "this  Negro  question  is  still  a  running  sore 
in  our  body  politic,"  and  that  among  the  prob 
lems  of  this  country  it  "  promises  to  be  the 
most  serious  of  all,"  and  "is  still  far  from  being 
solved." 

Now,  it  is  only  fair  to  assume  that  each  and 
all  the  writers  who  have  turned  aside  from  the 
more  effective  partisan  media  of  the  daily  news- 
88 


A  SIMPLER  SOUTHERN  QUESTION.         89 

paper,  legislative  halls,  the  public  platform,  and 
the  "stump,"  to  the  pages  of  the  magazines  and 
reviews,  have  done  so  in  the  desire  to  help  the 
question  along  toward  its  final  solution  by  aiding 
to  make  it  in  each  case  clearer  and  simpler  than 
it  was  before.  If  so,  then  we  may  assume  also 
that  writers,  editors,  and  readers  will  not  repel 
an  effort,  if  it  be  intelligent  and  sincere,  to  gather 
from  several  of  these  writers'  utterances  some 
conclusive  replies  to  questions  whose  answer  and 
removal  from  the  debate  will  greatly  reduce  the 
intricacies  of  the  problem. 

II.  Can  the  Southern  question  be  solved? 
There  are  men  in  the  North  and  South,  who  say 
no,  and,  without  being  at  all  able  to  tell  what 
they  mean  by  the  phrase,  think  it  must  be  "left 
to  solve  itself."  But  careful  thinkers,  on  either 
side  of  the  question,  never  so  reply.  Their  ad 
mission,  whether  tacit  or  expressed,  is  that  "  can 
be  "  is  out  of  the  debate ;  it  must  be  solved.  It 
is  a  running,  not  a  self-healing  sore  ;  one  of  those 
great  problems  "  whose  solution,"  as  Mr.  Eustis 
says,  "  strains  the  bonds  of  society  and  taxes  the 
wisest  statesmanship ;"  that  kind  of  problems 
with  some  one  of  which  "  every  nation  must 
deal."  We  must  solve  it. 

Is  it  being  solved  ?  We  look  in  vain  for  any 
one's  direct  yes  or  no.  Governor  Colquitt  seems 


9O          A  SIMPLER  SOUTHERN  QUESTION. 

to  come  nearest  to  the  distinct  affirmation  when 
he  says :  "  A  sense  of  moral  and  religious 
responsibility  is  restraining  and  directing  us  in 
our  State  polity  and  practice;  and  ...  I  think 
we  have  had  more  than  an  average  success  in 
discharging  the  obligations  imposed  upon  us." 
Among  these  he  includes  pointedly  the  assuring 
of  the  Negro  in  the  full  enjoyment  of  his  politi 
cal  rights.  But  setting  out  to  speak  for  the 
South,  he  speaks  in  fact  only  for  Georgia,  and 
makes  no  plain  claim  that,  even  so,  the  Negro 
question  in  Georgia  is  really  being  pushed 
toward  its  settlement.  On  the  other  hand,  when 
Senator  Chandler  says :  "  The  political  control 
of  the  United  States  is  now  in  the  hands  of 
a  Southern  oligarchy  as  persistent  and  relent 
less  as  was  that  which  plunged  the  nation  into 
the  slaveholders'  rebellion ;"  and  when  Senator 
Eustis  falls  short  only  by  a  slender  "  if"  of  the 
blunt  assertion  that  "  the  Negro  problem  still 
exists  in  its  original  relations,"  these  gentlemen 
surely  are  not  to  be  understood  as  implying  that 
the  question  has  made  or  is  making  no  advance 
toward  solution.  Both  of  them  yield  a  recogni 
tion  of  facts  which  make  it  unreasonable  so  to 
construe  their  meaning.  In  truth,  it  is  indisput 
able  facts  that  we  need  from  which  to  draw  our 
final  answer  to  this  important  query,  rather  than 


A  SIMPLER  SOUTHERN  QUESTION.         QI 

any  person's  or  any  multitude  of  persons'  general 
assurances  or  ever  so  profound  beliefs.  And  for 
some  such  facts  we  are  indebted  to  these  gentle 
men  as  well  as  to  others. 

III.  The  Negro  question  is  three-quarters  of  a 
century  old.  Within  that  period  a  vast  major 
ity  of  the  nation  have  totally  changed  their  con 
victions  as  to  what  are  the  Negro's  public  rights. 
Within  that  period  the  sentiment  of  every  com 
munity  and  the  laws  of  every  State  in  the  Union, 
as  well  as  the  Federal  Government,  have  been 
radically  altered  concerning  him.  In  their  di 
mensions,  in  their  scope,  in  their  character,  the 
problem's  original  relations  have  passed  through 
a  great  and  often  radical  change.  So  far  from 
the  problem  still  existing  in  its  original  rela 
tions,  only  two  or  three  of  those  original  rela 
tions  any  longer  exist.  Within  the  memory  of 
men  still  in  active  life  there  was  not  a  foot  of  soil 
under  the  American  flag  where  a  Negro  detected 
fleeing  from  slavery  was  safe  from  violence.  Now, 
it  is  several  months  since  it  was  asserted  in  the 
Forum  *  that  the  Negro  in  the  United  States  "  has 
enjoyed  for  at  least  twenty  years  a  larger  share 
of  private,  public,  religious  and  political  liberty 
than  falls  to  the  lot  of  any  but  a  few  people — the 

*  See  "  What  Shall  the  Negro  Do  ?"     Page  66. 


92         A  SIMPLER  SOUTHERN  QUESTION. 

freest  in  the  world,"  and  thus  far  no  writer,  black 
or  white,  has  challenged  the  statement.  And  the 
vast  changes  that  have  been  effected — not  by 
time,  mark  it,  but  by  men,  sometimes  at  peril, 
sometimes  at  cost,  of  their  lives,  in  Northern 
States  as  well  as  in  Southern — have  been  very 
uniformly  in  the  direction  of  the  great  problem's 
simplification  and  solution.  The  problem  is  being 
solved ;  slowly,  through  the  years,  it  is  true  ;  in 
pain,  in  sweat,  in  blood,  with  many  a  mistake, 
many  a  discouragement,  many  an  enemy,  and, 
saddest  of  all,  many  a  neutral  friend  in  North 
and  South ;  yet  it  is  being  solved,  and  it  is  only 
by  misconceiving  the  motive  of  those  who  have 
effected  these  changes  that  Mr.  Eustis,  for  in 
stance,  can  call  the  long,  fruitful  and  still  persist 
ent  and  determined  effort  an  "  unsuccessful  ex 
periment."  For  it  is  not,  and  never  has  been,  an 
effort  "  to  balance  or  equalize  the  condition  of 
the  white  and  Negro  races  in  this  country,"  but 
only  to  balance  or  equalize  their  enjoyment  of 
their  public  and  political  rights,  to  establish  a 
common  and  uniform  public  justice  and  equity, 
and  trust  the  untrammeled  selections  of  private 
society  and  "the  laws  of  nature  and  nature's 
God  "  still  to  maintain  all  proper  equalities  and 
inequalities  of  race  and  condition.  The  fact 
must  be  admitted  by  all  fair  minds  to  be  estab- 


A  SIMPLER  SOUTHERN  QUESTION.         93 

lishcd  and  removed  from  debate,  that  in  some 
aspects,  at  least,  the  Negro  problem's  "  original  " 
relations  are  altered,  when  men  like  Governor 
Colquitt,  men  in  the  front  ranks  of  political  life, 
their  political  fortunes  largely  dependent  on  what 
they  say,  eagerly  choose  to  deny  with  indigna 
tion  that  either  they  or  their  constituents,  in 
States  where  once  it  was  against  the  law  to  teach 
a  colored  child  to  read,  now  either  practice  or 
believe  in  the  entire  or  partial  suppression  of  the 
Negro  vote,  and  as  eagerly  boast — with  statistical 
figures  to  back  them — that  their  public  schools 
are  educating  twice  as  many  thousands  of  colored 
youth  now  as  they  were  educating  hundreds 
fifteen  years  ago.  True,  there  are  men  in  the 
South  who  talk  very  differently.  Aye,  and  in 
the  North,  too.  When  there  are  none  such  left 
in  the  Southern  States  they  will  be  far  ahead,  at 
least  of  where  the  Northern  are  now,  toward  the 
whole  question's  final  solution. 

IV.  One  of  the  most  conclusive  proofs  that 
the  changes  that  have  been  made  in  the  Negro's 
status  have  been  generally  in  the  direction  of 
true  progress,  is  that  wherever  and  whenever 
these  changes  have  been  made  complete  and 
operative,  opposition  to  them  has  disappeared 
and  they  have  dropped  out  of  the  main  problem, 
leaving  it  by  so  much  the  lighter  and  simpler. 


94         A  SIMPLER  SOUTHERN  QUESTION. 

The  most  notable  instance,  of  course,  is  the  abo 
lition  of  slavery;  but  there  are  many  lesser 
examples  in  the  history  of  both  Northern  and 
Southern  States :  the  teaching  of  Negroes  in 
private  schools;  their  admission  into  public 
schools;  their  sitting  on  juries;  their  acceptance 
as  court  witnesses ;  their  riding  in  street  cars ; 
their  enlistment  in  the  militia;  their  appointment 
on  the  police,  etc.  It  is  a  fact  worthy  of  more 
consideration  than  it  gets  from  the  debaters  on 
either  side  of  the  Negro  question,  that  such 
changes  as  these,  which  nobody  finds  any  reason 
for  undoing  in  any  place  where  they  have  been 
fully  established,  were,  until  they  were  made,  as 
fiercely  opposed  and  esteemed  as  dishonorable, 
humiliating,  unjust,  and  unsafe  to  white  men  and 
women,  as  those  changes  which,  in  many  regions 
of  our  country,  not  all  of  them  Southern,  still 
remain  to  be  made  before  the  Negro  question 
will  let  itself  be  dismissed.  This  fact  no  one  will 
dispute.  Yet  thousands  shut  their  eyes  and  ears, 
or  let  others  shut  them,  to  the  equal  though  not 
as  salient  truth  of  this  fact's  corollary,  to  wit : 
that  every  step  toward  the  perfecting  of  one 
common  public  liberty  for  all  American  citizens 
is  opposed  and  postponed  only  where  it  never 
has  been  fairly  tried. 

Even  the  various  public  liberties  intended  to 


A  SIMPLER  SOUTHERN  QUESTION.         95 

be  secured  to  all  men  alike  by  the  Civil  Rights 
Bill  have  rarely  if  ever,  in  any  place,  been  actu 
ally  secured  and  made  operative  and  afterward 
withdrawn  and  lost.  Only  where  they  have  been 
merely  legalized  and  not  practically  established, 
but  bitterly  fought  and  successfully  nullified 
throughout  reconstruction  days,  have  they  since 
been  unlegalized,  condemned,  and  falsely  pro 
claimed  to  have  been  fairly  tried  and  found  want 
ing.  The  infamous  Glenn  bill,  in  the  Georgia 
legislature,  may  be  thrust  before  us  by  debaters 
of  the  passionate  sort  on  either  side  as  a  glaring 
exception;  but  its  fate,  its  final  suffocation,  makes 
it  more  an  example  than  an  exception,  even 
though  this  was  effected  by  a  compromise  which 
will  hardly  be  brought  forward  as  evidence  of  "a 
sensibility  of  honor  that  would  'feel  a  stain  like 
a  wound.'  "* 

V.  But  the  Negro  vote.  Surely,  many  will 
say,  that  was  abundantly  tried,  and  earned  its 
own  condemnation  in  the  corruptions  and  disas 
ters  of  the  reconstruction  period.  Now  this 
would  be  a  fair  statement  only  if  the  ultimate 
purpose  of  the  reconstruction  scheme  had  been 
simply  to  secure  the  Negro  in  his  right  to  vote. 
We  shall  see  that  it  was  not.  Much  less  was  it 

*  Governor  Colquitt,  in  the  Forum,  November,  1887. 


96         A  SIMPLER  SOUTHERN  QUESTION. 

to  establish,  to  use  Senator  Hampton's  phrase, 
"  the  political  supremacy  of  the  Negro,"  or,  as  Mr. 
Watterson  charges,  to  erect  "  a  black  oligarchy 
at  the  South,"  or,  as  Governor  Colquitt  puts  it, "  to 
Africanize  the  States  of  the  South."  These  defi 
nitions  belong — to  borrow  again  Mr.  Watterson's 
thought — to  the  hysterics  of  the  question.  That 
fervid  writer  more  than  half  refutes  the  charge 
when  he  follows  it  closely  with  the  assertion  that 
"  the  scheme  was  preposterous  in  its  failure  to  re 
cognize  the  simplest  operation  of  human  nature 
upon  human  affairs,  and  in  its  total  lack  of  fore 
sight."  But  surely,  whatever  may  be  said  of 
Sumner,  Stevens,  and  the  men  who  gathered 
around  them,  they  were  not  a  herd  of  perfect 
fools  with  a  "total  lack  of  foresight."  Not  the 
scheme  was,  but  the  charge  that  this  was  the 
scheme  is,  " preposterous."  The  scheme  included 
the  establishment  of  the  Negro  in  his  right  to 
vote;  but  its  greater  design  was,  as  we  have 
stated  in  an  earlier  paper,*  "  to  put  race  rule  of 
all  sorts  under  foot,  and  set  up  the  common  rule 
of  all,"  or  rather  "the  consent  of  all  to  the  rule 
of  a  minority  the  choice  of  the  majority,  fre 
quently  appealed  to  without  respect  of  persons." 
As  to  the  Negro  in  particular,  the  design, 

*THE  NEGRO  QUESTION;  pages  40,  41. 


A  SIMPLER  SOUTHERN  QUESTION.         97 

even  at  its  extreme,  was  to  enable  him — and 
here  we  are  indebted  to  Mr.  Eustis  for  a  phrase 
— "to  share  with  the  white  man  the  political 
responsibility  of  governing ;  "  or,  more  exactly, 
the  political  responsibility  of  choosing  governors. 
This  scheme  was  never  allowed  a  fair  trial  in 
any  of  the  once  seceding  States.  Every  effort 
to  give  it  such  was  powerfully  opposed  by  one 
great  national  political  party  throughout  the 
whole  Union,  "  while  " — to  quote  again  from  the 
same  earlier  paper — "the  greater  part  of  the 
wealth  and  intelligence  of  the  region  directly  in 
volved  held  out  sincerely,  steadfastly,  and  des 
perately  against  it  and  for  the  preservation  of 
unequal  public  privileges  and  class  domination." 
"  We  thought  we  saw,"  says  Governor  Colquitt, 
speaking  for  that  Southern  wealth  and  intelli 
gence  for  which  he  has  so  large  a  right  to  speak, 
"  a  determined  effort  so  completely  to  Africanize," 
etc.  But  Senator  Eustis,  who  also  has  his  right 
to  speak  for  them,  treats  that  thought  as  an 
absurdity  worthy  only  the  utterance  of  "  that 
foul  bird  of  prey,  the  carpet-bagger,"  who,  he 
writes,  "  encouraged  the  deluded  Negro  to  be 
lieve  that  the  Federal  Government  intended  that 
he  should  govern  the  white  race  in  the  South." 
The  thought  was  an  absurdity ;  an  absurdity  so 


98          A  SIMPLEX  SOUTHERN  QUESTION. 

palpable  that  an  intelligent  people  must  have 
rejected  it  but  for  the  conviction  behind  it  that, 
whatever  might  be  the  experiment's  design, 
"  Negro  supremacy  "  would  be  the  result.  And 
here  Messrs.  Eustis,  Colquitt,  Hampton,  and  the 
rest  seem  to  agree.  This  seems  to  be  the  poten 
tial  conviction  of  all  who  speak  or  write  on  that 
side  of  the  debate ;  and  we  dwell  upon  the  fact 
because  it  furnishes  such  weighty  evidence  of 
the  entire  truth  of  our  earlier  statement  that  this 
conviction,  this  fear,  is  the  whole  tap-root  of  the 
Negro  question  to-day.  Man  elsewhere  may 
hold  some  conjectural  belief  in  "  race  antago 
nisms,"  or  even  in  their  divine  appointment. 
Nowhere  in  the  world  do  the  laws  forbid  a  man 
this  belief.  In  every  land,  be  it  Massachusetts, 
Martinique,  or  Sierra  Leone,  he  may  indulge  it 
to  his  heart's  content  in  every  private  relation. 
It  is  only  where  a  people  are  moved  by  the  fear 
of  "  Negro  supremacy  "  that  the  simple  belief  in 
a  divinely  ordered  race  antagonism  is  used  to 
justify  the  withholding  of  impersonal  public 
rights  which  belong  to  every  man  because  he  is 
a  man,  and  with  which  race  and  its  real  or  im 
agined  antagonisms  have  nothing  whatever  to  do. 
It  is  only  under  that  fear  that  men  stand  up 
before  the  intelligent  and  moral  world  saying, 


A  SIMPLER  SOUTHERN  QUESTION.         99 

"  If  this  instinct  does  not  exist  it  is  necessary  to 
invent  it."*  There  is  a  Negro  question  which 
belongs  to  private  society  and  morals  and  to  the 
individual  conscience :  the  question  what  to  do 
to  and  with  the  Negro  within  that  realm  of  our 
own  private  choice  where  public  law  does  not 
and  dare  not  come.  But  the  Negro  question 
which  appeals  to  the  Nation,  to  the  laws,  and  to 
legislation,  is  only,  and  is  bound  to  be  only,  the 
question  of  public — civil  and  political — rights. 
Mr.  Eustis  says  truly,  "Our  plain  duty  should 
be  not  to  make  its  solution  more  difficult;"  but 
when  he  occupies  eleven  pages  of  the  Forum  with 
a  recriminative  entanglement  of  these  two  mat 
ters,  one  entirely  within,  the  other  entirely  be 
yond,  the  province  of  legislation,  he  is  wasting 
his  own  and  his  readers'  time  and  impeding  the 
solution  of  the  public  question ;  and  we  here 
challenge  him,  or  any  writer  of  his  way  of  think 
ing,  to  show  from  the  pen  of  any  Negro  of  na 
tional  reputation,  Douglass,  Lynch,  Bruce,  Down 
ing,  Williams,  Grimke,  Matthews,  Fortune,  or 
any  other,  anything  but  their  repudiation  of  this 
— blind,  let  us  believe,  rather  than  wilful — at 
tempt  to  make  a  "  Siamese  union,"  as  Mr.  Glad- 


*  See  Century  Magazine,  April,  1885,  page  911,  "In   Plain 
Black  and  White,"  by  H.  W.  Grady. 


100       A  SIMPLER  SOUTHERN  QUESTION. 

stone  would  say,  between  these  two  distinct 
issues.  As  far  as  it  is  or  of  right  can  be  a  muni 
cipal,  State,  inter-State,  or  national  problem  at 
all,  the  question  to-day,  primed  of  all  its  dead 
wood,  is  this :  Shall  the  Negro,  individually, 
enjoy  equally,  and  only  equally,  with  the  white 
man  individually,  that  full  measure  of  an  Ameri 
can  citizen's  public  rights,  civil  and  political,  de 
creed  to  him  both  as  his  and  as  an  essential  to 

f  the  preservation  of  equal  rights  between  the 
States ;  or  shall  he  be  compelled  to  abandon 
these  inalienable  human  rights  to  the  custody  of 
Mr.  Eustis's  exclusively  "  white  man's  govern 
ment,"  and  "  rely  implicitly  upon  the  magnanim 
ity  of  his  white  fellow-citizens  of  the  South  to 

\  treat  him  with  the  justice  and  generosity  due  to 
\  his  unfortunate  condition  ?"  Shall  or  shall  not 
this  second  choice  be  forced  upon  him  for  fear 
that  otherwise  these  seven  (million)  black  and 
lean  kine  may,  so  to  speak,  devour  the  twelve 
(million)  white,  fat  kine,  and  "  the  torches  of 
Caucasian  civilization  be  extinguished "  in  the 
South,  despite  the  "  race  antagonism "  of  the 
most  powerful  fifty-three  million  whites  on  earth? 
Is  it  not  almost  time  for  a  really  intrepid  people 
to  be  getting  ashamed  of  such  a  fear.*  But  that 

*  For  a  special  consideration  of  the  question  of  "  race  instinct," 
and  the  maintenance  of  the  color  line,  see  the  short  article 
printed  supplementary  to  this. 


A  SIMPLEX  SOUTHERN  QUESTION.       IOI 

this  fear  is  the  main  root  of  the  whole  Southern 
problem  is  further  proved  by  the  fact  that  no 
speaker  or  writer  on  that  side  of  the  debate, 
North  or  South,  ever  denies  it.  And  neither 
does  any  attempt  to  prove  that  it  is  well 
grounded.  Like  Senator  Hampton,  all  these 
debaters  content  themselves  with  the  absurd 
assumption  that  the  peaceable  enjoyment,  by  the 
white  man  and  the  Negro,  of  an  equal  and  common 
civil  and  political  citizenship  was  fairly  tried  in 
the  reconstruction  period,  and  that  "a  large 
class  at  the  North  "  have  believed  in  and  still 
want  "  Negro  supremacy  "  wherever  the  Negro  is 
in  the  majority.  Challenged  to  actual  argument, 
they  are  silent,  until  some  one  asks  some  subor 
dinate  question :  Is  the  Negro  contented  and 
prosperous  ?  Is  he  allowed  to  vote  ?  Is  his 
vote  fairly  counted  ?  Has  he  all  his  civil  rights  ? 
Are  outbreaks  due  to  political  causes  ?  Then 
their  answers  are  abundant  again ;  and  as  final 
proof  that  not  these,  but  the  earlier  question,  is 
truly  the  main  issue  now,  there  are  scarcely  any 
two  who  do  not  contradict  themselves  and  one 
another. 

VI.  The  least  discordance  of  statement  on  these 
minor  points  is  on  that  of  "  race  antagonism." 
And  for  the  obvious  reason  that,  attributed  to 
the  Negro,  who  always  denies  it,  it  excuses  the 


102       A  SIMPLER  SOUTHERN  QUESTION. 

bald  assumption  that  no  matter  what  he  says,  he 
must  want  to  establish  a  "black  oligarchy;" 
while,  attributed  to  the  white  race,  it  excuses  the 
theory  that  the  white  man  cannot  even  by  way 
of  experiment  give  the  black  man  white  men's 
rights,  because  natural  instinct  will  not  let  him. 
"  But  you  must !  "  says  conscience.  "  But  I  can't! " 
says  fear.  Yet  even  on  this  point  there  is  not 
full  concord.  Mr.  Eustis  "  believes  " — he  counts 
it  quite  enough  to  "  believe  "  and  needless  to  prove 
— that  this  instinctive  antagonism  justifies  the 
subjection  of  the  Negro,  forcible  if  need  be,  to  a 
"  white  man's  government ;  "  while,  as  far  back 
as  1867,  General  Hampton  "recognized  that  in 
a  republic  such  as  ours  no  citizen  ought  to  be 
excluded  from  any  of  the  rights  of  citizenship 
because  of  his  color  or  of  any  other  arbitrary 
distinction."  Where  was  and  where  is  the  gen 
tleman's  instinctive  race  antagonism  ?  It  is  not 
in  his  list  of  necessities.  He  believed  "  a  large 
class  "  was  bent  on  establishing  "  race  suprem 
acy,"  and  if  there  was  to  be  "  race  supremacy," 
then,  of  course,  and  naturally  enough,  it  must 
be  the  supremacy  of  the  white  race,  instinct  or 
no  instinct ;  while  Mr.  Eustis  regarded  the  race- 
supremacy  scheme  as  a  carpet-bagger's  lie,  and 
could  justify  the  subjugation  of  the  Negro  mainly 
on  the  belief  that  to  protest  against  it  is  "an  inso- 


A  SIMPLER  SOUTHERN  QUESTION.       IO3 

lent  demand  for  the  revision  of  the  laws  of  na 
ture."  But  under  neither  philosophy  does  the 
Negro  get  a  white  man's  public  rights. 

We  find  still  wider  variances  on  some  other 
points.  "  Is  the  Negro  vote  suppressed  ? " 
Messrs.  Foraker,  Edmunds,  Chandler  and  Hal- 
stead  still  roundly  make  the  charge.  But  they 
are  all  of  one  party  and  are  human  ;  what  is  the 
reply  of  the  other  side  ?  Human,  too,  of  course ; 
but  it  is  also  what  Mr.  Silas  Wegg  might  call 
"human  warious."  Says  Governor  Colquitt: 
"  We  therefore  will  not  suffer  the  charge  .  .  . 
of  defrauding  the  Negro  out  of  his  vote  to  go 
unchallenged.  We  deny,  as  roundly  as  our 
enemies  make  the  charge,  that  the  Negro  is 
denied  a  right  to  vote." 

He  speaks  for  the  whole  South.  Headdresses 
himself  to  the  "  alleged  suppression  of  the  Negro 
vote  in  the  South,"  just  as  Mr.  Watterson  ad 
dresses  himself  to  "a  claim  .  .  .  that  the 
Negro  vote  is  suppressed  ...  by  the  white 
people  of  the  South."  True,  Governor  Colquitt 
speaks  especially  for  Georgia,  but  he  distinctly 
offers  Georgia  as  a  fair  sample  of  all  the  Southern 
States,  and  claims  for  the  men  on  "  the  roll  of 
members  elect  from  Georgia  to  the  next  Con 
gress,  and  in  fact  that  from  any  other  Southern 
State,"  "  a  love  of  truth  and  honesty  that  would 


104       A  SIMPLER  SOUTHERN  QUESTION. 

cause  them  to  refuse  the  presidency  if  it  had  to 
be  won  by  fraud  on  any  one,  black  or  white." 
And  Governor  Colquitt  ought  to  know.     But 
who  ought  to  know  better  than  Mr.  Watterson  ? 
And  Mr.  Watterson,  not  some  time  before,  but 
six  months  later,  writes  :  "  I  should  be  entitled 
to  no  respect  or  credit  if  I  pretended  that  there 
is  either  a  fair  poll  or  count  of  the  vast  overflow 
of  black  votes  in  States  where  there  is  a  negro 
majority,  or  that  in  the  nature  of  things  present 
there  can  be."     Now,  the  worst  about  these  flat 
contradictions,  in  a  matter  confessedly  involving 
the  right  to  the  nation's  "  respect  and  credit,"  and 
to  a  reputation  for  "  love  of  truth  and  honesty," 
is  that  they  will  remain  amicably  unsettled.  Each 
respondent  will  sincerely  believe  what  he  has 
stated,  and  the  whole  circle  of  party  managers 
on  their  side  of  the  issue  will  go  on  playing 
"  thimble,  thimble,"  with  the  tormented  question. 
Other  secondary  questions  fare  no  better.  Are 
outbreaks  between  the  two  races  in  the  South 
frequently  due  to  political  causes  ?     For  twenty 
years  we  have  heard  that  they  are  and  that  they 
are  not.     What  says  Senator  Eustis  ?     He  has  a 
divinely  ordered  race  antagonism  to  assert,  and 
so  tells  us  that,  this  being  the  cause,  almost  any 
thing   may   be   the   occasion.      "Some  sudden 
unforeseen    incident,  political,  religious,  educa- 


A  SIMPLER  SOUTHERN  QUESTION.       1 05 

tional,  social,  or  what  not,  may  at  any  moment 
arouse  the  passions  of  race  hatred  and  convulse 
society  by  the  outbreak  of  race  conflicts."  To 
him  the  real  cause  of  amazement  is  "  that  these 
conflicts  are  not  more  frequent  and  more  bloody." 
Exactly ;  the  race  antagonism  theory  does  not 
half  work.  What  says  Governor  Colquitt  ? 
"  Friendly  relations  habitually  exist  between  our 
white  and  black  citizens,  and  are  never  disturbed 
except  on  those  occasions  when  the  exigencies 
of  party  politics  call  for  an  agitation  of  race 
prejudices." 

VII.  Such  discrepancies  are  broad ;  but  they 
shrink  to  narrowness  when  compared  with 
Senator  Eustis's  contradictions  of  himself.  Is 
the  Negro  contented  and  prospering  ?  There 
are  actually  millions  of  citizens  wanting  to  know. 
Let  Mr.  Eustis  answer  :  i .  "  His  [the  Negro's] 
craving  for  federal  tutorship  is  still  unsatisfied. 
The  white  man's  patience  is  to-day  taxed  as  ever 
by  the  unending  complaints  of  the  Negro  and 
his  friends.  .  .  .  He  still  yearns  for  this  fruitless 
agitation  touching  his  right  and  his  status." 
2.  "This  total  want  of  possible  assimilation  pro 
duces  antipathy,  quasi  hostility,  between  the  two 
races,  North  as  well  as  South,"  whose  manifesta 
tions  "  both  races  regard  as  the  incidents  of  a 
struggle  for  supremacy  and  domination."  3. 


106       A  SIMPLER  SOUTHERN  QUESTION. 

"  If  this  [race  antagonism]  were  not  the  case  the 
Negro  would  have  the  right  to  appeal  to  the 
enlightened  judgment  and  to  the  sense  of  justice 
of  the  American  people,  to  protect  him  against 
the  unfeeling  arrogance  and  relentless  proscrip 
tion  which  he  has  so  long  endured  as  the  result 
of  the  white  man's  intolerance."  4.  "  In  the 
South  to-day  he  is  happy,  contented  and  satis 
fied!  "  Mr.  Eustis  is  almost  as  violently  out  of 
tune  with  himself  as  to  the  Negro's  acceptance 
of  his  private  social  status,  but  we  shall  not 
quote ;  the  question  of  the  Negro's  entrance  into 
private  white  society,  we  again  protest,  is  en 
tirely  outside  the  circle  of  his  civil  rights.  No 
intelligent  advocate  of  a  common  enjoyment  of 
all  civil  rights  by  both  races  has  argued  to  the 
contrary,  and  the  present  writer  has  never  written 
a  line  in  favor  of  it.  As  a  moral  and  personal 
question  it  admits,  no  doubt,  of  public  discussion, 
but  as  to  its  connection  with  any  problem  of 
political  or  civil  rights  between  the  two  races,  all 
that  needs  recognition  is  that  it  is  completely  out 
of  that  question. 

Such  is  the  conflict  of  testimony  from  the 
choicest  witnesses  on  one  side  of  the  case.  It  is 
a  common  saying  on  that  side,  that  communities 
at  a  distance  cannot  understand  this  Negro 
problem.  The  fact  is  quite  overlooked  that  a 


A  SIMPLER  SOUTHERN  QUESTION.       IO/ 

large  majority  of  these  communities  no  great 
while  back  held  the  very  same  views  about  it 
that  are  still  held  so  largely  in  the  South ;  and 
the  very  feminine  argument  that  opposing  de 
baters  "  cannot  understand  "  because  of  "  pro 
found  ignorance,"  etc.,  is  only  an  unconscious 
way  of  admitting  that  one's  own  side  cannot 
agree  upon  one  full  and  clear  explanation. 

Fortunately  we  need  not  insist  upon  uniform 
answers  to  these  questions.  They  are  second 
ary.  Let  us  only  push  on  to  the  problem's 
main  citadel.  Whenever  it  falls  all  really  depend 
ent  questions  must  surrender.  And  many  others ; 
as,  for  instance,  Must  the  average  mental  and 
moral  calibre  of  the  whole  Negro  race  in  America 
equal  that  of  the  white  race,  before  any  Negro 
in  a  Southern  State  is  entitled  to  the  civil  and 
political  standing  decreed  to  all  citizens  of  the 
United  States  except  the  criminal  and  insane? 
Or  this  :  Does  the  Negro  throughout  the  domain 
of  civil  rights  enjoy  impersonal  but  individual 
consideration,  or  is  he  subjected  to  a  merely  class 
treatment  ?  The  nation  is  tired  of  contradictory 
answers  to  these  questions.  We  can  waive  them, 
if  only  such  chosen  witnesses  as  these  Southern 
writers  in  the  Fonnn  will  answer  this  :  Do  you, 
or  your  State  party,  recognize  as  civil  rights, 
whatever  rights  belong  to  any  and  every  person 


108       A  SIMPLER  SOUTHERN  QUESTION. 

simply  as  a  unit  in  the  civil  community  or  in  any 
public  part  of  it ;  and  do  you  advocate  the 
Negro's  enjoyment  of  each  and  every  one  of 
these  rights  under  only  and  exactly  the  same 
protections  and  limitations  he  would  be  under  if, 
just  as  he  is  in  everything  else,  he  were  white  ? 
This  is  not  a  national  party  question.  The 
Democratic  Party  is  answering  both  yea  and  nay 
to  this  in  various  parts  of  the  Union.  The 
national  party  question  is,  whether  the  federal 
government  may  compel  the  people  of  a  State  to 
answer  contrary  to  their  will.  We  waive  that 
question.  Will  you,  gentlemen,  answer  the 
question  we  ask  ? 

If  your  answer  is  that  you  favor  a  separated 
but  equivalent  enjoyment  of  civil  rights  by  the 
two  races,  consider  this :  That  equal  civil  rights 
inhere  in  the  individual  and  by  virtue  of  indi 
vidual  conditions  and  conduct.  Equivalent  civil 
rights  are  fictitiously  vested  in  classes  and  with 
out  regard  to  individual  conditions  or  conduct. 
They  cannot  be  even  truly  equivalent  when  sub 
stituted  for  equal  civil  rights  on  the  ground  of 
the  offensiveness  of  one  class  to  the  other  and 
without  regard  to  the  conditions  and  conduct  of 
the  individual.  Do  you  not  see  that  such  pre 
tended  equivalence  establishes  unequal  civil  lib 
erties,  and  do  you  favor,  or  do  you  condemn  it  ? 


A  SIMPLER  SOUTHERN  QUESTION.       109 

Or  answer  a  yet  simpler  question :  If  a  free 
ballot  and  a  fair  count  should  seem  about  to 
decide  in  your  State  that  equivalent  civil  rights 
must  give  place  to  equal  civil  rights  as  the  two 
are  above  defined,  would  you  or  your  State  party 
protect  that  free  ballot  and  fair  count  and  stand 
by  its  decision  ? 

Look  at  this  question  closely.  It  is  not  one 
upon  which  American  political  parties  can  hon 
estly  divide.  It  is  the  question  whether  the 
American  government  shall  or  shall  not  be  a 
government  "  of  the  people,  by  the  people,  for 
the  people,"  according  to  the  Constitution's  defi 
nition  of  who  the  people  are.  We  beg  to  be 
believed  that  every  word  here  written  is  uttered 
in  a  spirit  of  kindness  and  civil  fraternity.  We 
believe  that  to  these  two  questions  a  true  Amer 
ican  loyalty  can  in  calm  reflection  give  but  one 
answer.  But  we  as  sincerely  believe  that  these 
gentlemen  on  the  other  side  are  as  honorable 
and  loyal  in  their  intentions  and  are  as  sincere 
lovers  of  their  State's  and  the  nation's  common 
welfare  as  they  certainly  are  courteous  in  debate. 
We  trust  that  loyalty  and  courtesy  for  an  answer. 


WHAT  MAKES  THE  COLOR  LINE? 

The  popular  assumption  that  a  certain  antag 
onism  between  the  white  and  black  races  is 
natural,  inborn,  ineradicable,  has  never  been 
scientifically  proved  or  disproved.  Even  if  it 
were,  that  would  not  necessarily  fix  a  complete 
and  sufficient  rule  of  conduct.  To  be  governed 
merely  by  instincts  is  pure  savagery.  All 
civilization  is  the  result  of  the  subordination  of 
instinct  to  reason,  and  to  the  necessities  of  peace, 
amity  and  righteousness.  To  surrender  to  in 
stinct  would  destroy  all  civilization  in  three  days. 
If,  then,  the  color  line  is  the  result  of  natural 
instincts,  the  commonest  daily  needs  of  the 
merest  civilization  require  that  we  should  ask 
ourselves,  is  it  better  or  worse  to  repress  or  cher 
ish  this  instinct  and  this  color  line?  Wherein 
and  how  far  is  its  repression,  or  its  maintenance, 
the  better  ?  If  we  decide  that  in  civil  and  polit 
ical  matters  the  color  line  is  bad,  the  next  ques 
tion  must  be,  who  makes  the  color  line  in  poli 
tics,  and  what  will  break  it  ?  The  fact  is,  certain 
men  are  continually  swinging  between  two  state 
ments  :  First,  that  the  color  line  in  everything 
else  but  politics  is  an  imperative  necessity;  and, 
no 


WHA  T  MAKES  THE  COL  OR  LINE  ?         Ill 

second,  that  the  color  line  in  politics  is  the  source 
of  all  their  trouble,  and  is  drawn  by  the  black 
man,  against  the  white  man's  choice.  But  poli 
tics  is  not  and  cannot  be  a  thing  by  itself;  with 
out  the  other  provinces  of  life,  politics  is  no  more 
than  the  ciphers  of  an  arithmetical  number. 
Politics  is  what  we  do  or  propose  to  do  in  and 
for  the  various  relations  of  public  society.  So, 
then,  no  progress  can  be  made  in  the  solution  of 
Southern  troubles  until  we  settle  the  question, 
not  who  makes,  but  what  makes  the  color  line 
in  politics.  For,  obviously,  one  set  of  people 
may  be  compelled  to  draw  a  line  in  politics  for 
which  another  set  of  people  is  morally  respon 
sible.  But  when  we  settle  ivhat  draws  the  color 
line  in  politics,  we  are  preparing  ourselves  to  say 
whether  the  line  need  be  drawn  or  not.  How 
ever,  to  inquire  carefully  who  draws  the  color 
line,  may  be  the  easiest  way  to  demonstrate  what 
draws  it.  Let  us  point  out  the  strictly  artificial 
character  of  certain  things,  now  existing  and 
active,  which  would  compel  the  drawing  of  race 
lines  by  any  race  under  heaven  that  might  be 
subjected  to  them. 

Some  of  these,  says  a  recent  Southern  writer, 
are  just  as  strictly  of  white  men's  own  making 
as  they  are  artificial.  To  deny,  abridge  or  jeop 
ardize  a  negro's  right  to  vote,  to  hold  office,  to 


112         WHAT  MAKES  THE  COLOR  LINE? 

sit  on  jury,  or  to  enjoy  any  of  the  public  advan 
tages  around  him  on  the  same  terms  as  others, 
without  any  consideration  of  his  own  individual 
values — good,  bad  or  indifferent — except  that  he 
is  an  individual  of  a  certain  race,  is  making  an 
entirely  artificial  and  irrelevant  use  of  a  limited 
natural  distinction.  But,  says  this  writer,  the 
Negroes  obtained  all  these  "  cardinal  and  essen 
tial  rights  in  spite  of  our  [Southern  white  men's] 
most  determined  and  bitter  opposition."  Speak 
ing  as  an  old  citizen  of  Virginia,  he  says  that  the 
poll-tax  as  a  qualification  for  voting  was  a  meas 
ure  aimed  solely  at  the  negro,  and  was  finally 
abolished  because  it  was  found  to  keep  more 
whites  than  blacks  from  the  polls.  In  North  Caro 
lina,  by  laws  expressly  and  avowedly  enacted  for 
that  purpose,  the  form  of  government  is  central 
ized,  the  county  officers  are  appointed  by  the 
Governor,  and  the  Negroes  are  deprived  of  the 
local  self-government  which  county  majorities  of 
their  race  might  give  them.  In  South  Carolina, 

t  the  system  of  electoral  machinery  is  especially 
and  confessedly  designed,  and  effectually  ope- 

•  rated,  to  deprive  the  Negroes  of  a  voice  in  politics. 
He  quotes  from  a  leading  Southern  newspaper, 
that  "  as  long  as  a  white  man  capable  of  holding 
office  can  be  found,  no  negro,  however  worthy 
and  capable,  shall  be  appointed." 


WHA  T  MAKES  THE  COL  OR  LINE  ?         113 

The  Negroes  never  did  and  do  not  now  draw 
a  strict  color  line  in  politics.  Even  in  recon 
struction  days,  when  everything  favored  Negro 
supremacy,  the  Negroes  generally  entrusted  the 
public  offices  of  county  and  State  to  white  men. 
And  speaking  for  Virginia,  even  as  late  as  1878- 
82,  when  the  party  of  which  the  Negroes  were 
the  main  strength  had  absolute  control  of  the 
State,  almost  every  office,  from  United  States 
Senator  to  clerks  in  the  State  Capitol,  were  given 
to  white  men,  and  white  men  were  elected  to 
Congress,  and  to  the  State  Legislature,  by  un 
questioned  Negro  majorities.  Even  to  this  day, 
in  the  so-called  "  Black  Counties,"  the  negroes 
generally  yield  to  the  whites  all  but  the  smallest 
and  least  desirable  offices.  "Whatever  their  other 
defects,"  says  the  writer  quoted,  "the  Negroes,  as 
a  rule,  have  sense  enough  to  select  for  office 
holders  the  best  whites  they  can  find  in  their 
own  party,  and  in  default  of  them  they  select  the 
best  Democrats  obtainable."  If  the  negroes  are 
too  ignorant  to  fill  the  offices  themselves,  surely 
no  better  testimony  than  this  to  their  wisdom 
and  public  spirit  could  be  asked  for.  And  if  they 
do  this  because  of  their  own  incompetency  to 
govern,  all  the  more  from  this  example,  Southern 
white  people  "  should  dismiss,  as  unmanly  and 
unwarrantable,  the  fear  that  ruin  and  disaster 
9 


114         WHAT  MAKES  THE  COLOR  LINE? 

will  follow  in  the  train  of  the  free  suffrage  of  the 
blacks." 

The  adherence  of  the  Negro  to  what  the  South 
calls  the  "Radical"  party  is  the  only  result  that 
could  be  expected,  in  view  of  the  attitude  of  the 
two  parties  in  the  South  toward  him.  The  one 
gave  him  freedom  and  citizenship,  and  promises, 
at  least,  to  do  what  it  can  to  secure  him  in  the 
exercise  of  his  rights.  The  other  still  says  to 
him  not  only  that  he  belongs  to  a  degraded  and 
inferior  race,  but  that  in  all  his  public  relations 
he  must  be  judged  and  treated  according  to  his 
race's  merits  and  demerits,  while  his  white  fellow- 
citizen  monopolizes  the  ennobling  liberty  of  being 
judged  and  treated  according  to  what  he  is  him 
self.  "  With  these  facts  before  us,  how  can  we 
expect  the  Negroes  to  be  anything  but  our  politi 
cal  opponents  and  the  adherents  of  our  political 
adversaries  ?" 

"To  break  this  dark  and  ominous  color  line, 
rests  with  us ;  but  we  can  only  obliterate  it  by 
treating  the  Negroes  with  equity  and  impar 
tiality,  and  by  according  them  cheerfully  all  the 
rights  that  we  ourselves  enjoy." 

The  sum  is  this : — 

I.  That  where  the  color  line  is  drawn  arbi 
trarily  and  artificially  in  any  merely  civil  relation 
in  the  South,  it  is  drawn  by  the  white  man. 


IVHA  T  MAKES  THE  COL  OR  LINE  ?         115 

2.  That  even  by  the  whfte   man   the  black 
man  is  not  charged  with  drawing  the  color  line 
contrary  to  the  white  man's  wish,  save  only  in 
politics. 

3.  That  even  in  politics  the  black  man  draws 
the  color  line  only  where  any  man  would  draw 
it  if  he  were  colored ;  that  is,  only  against  those 
white  men  who  draw  the  color  line  inexorably 
in  every  other  public  relation. 

Why,  then,  in  strictly  public  relations  should 
not  this  incalculably  expensive  color  line  be 
removed  ? 


THE  SOUTHERN  STRUGGLE  FOR 
PURE  GOVERNMENT. 

I. 

The  world  has  ceased  to  look  to  imperial  rule 
for  pure  government  Men  may  at  times  still 
couple  the  two,  but  it  is  only  in  momentary 
resentment  of  the  fact  that  nowhere  yet  is  there 
a  people  under  electoral  rule  whose  government 
is  entirely  pure. 

Yet,  excepting  Russia,  there  is  hardly  a  people 
of  European  origin  on  earth  that  has  not  secured 
in  some  valuable  degree  the  enjoyment  of  elec 
toral  representative  government;  and  although 
the  impurities  remaining  in  such  governments  lie 
mainly  in  their  defective  electoral  methods,  yet 
the  world  refuses  to  look  back  to  imperial  rule 
for  refuge  or  remedy.  Not  the  suffocation,  but 
the  purification,  of  the  ballot  is  recognized  as 
the  key  to  the  purification  of  government. 

But  how  shall  we  purify  the  ballot  ?  We  can 
not  say  only  the  pure  shall  vote,  and  then  decide, 
on  crude  generalizations  who,  or  what  sorts,  are 
pure.  That  would  be  as  if  instead  of  making  a 
filter  work  thoroughly,  we  should  forbid  that  any 
116 


STRUGGLE  FOR  PURE  GOVERNMENT.    1 1/ 

but  pure  water  be  put  into  the  filter.  No  class  or 
party  is  so  pure  but  its  vote  needs  the  filtration 
of  effective  electoral  methods ;  methods  so  effec 
tive  as  to  bear  the  whole  strain  of  a  genuinely 
popular  vote.  For  any  class  to  say,  "  The  pure 
shall  constitute  the  State,  and  we  are  the  pure," 
is  itself  imperial  tyranny.  But  we  can  say  the 
vote  shall  be  pure,  and  trust  ultimately  to  see  a 
purified  ballot  purify  the  balloters.  Not  the 
banishment  of  all  impure  masses  from  the  polls, 
but  the  equal  and  complete  emancipation  of  all 
balloters  from  all  impure  temptations  or  con 
straints,  is  the  key  to  the  purification  of  the  ballot. 
It  stands  to  reason  that  most  men  want  good 
government.  If  without  constraints  they  choose 
bad  government  it  is  by  mistake.  Society  dis 
franchises  the  felon,  the  idiot,  the  pauper,  the 
lunatic,  because  it  is  fair  to  infer,  as  it  is  not  of 
men  in  general,  that  they  have  no  clear  choice 
for  good  government.  The  only  trouble  is  that 
though  most  men  want  good  government,  they 
want  it,  mostly,  for  themselves.  From  these  two 
truths  rise  the  wisdom  and  necessity  of  self- 
government.  Men  can  never  safely  depend  upon 
others  to  supply  them  benevolently  with  good 
government.  "  No  man  is  good  enough  to 
govern  another  without  his  consent ;  "  the  only 
free  government  is  self-government.  But  the 


I  I  8    STRUGGLE  FOR  PURE  GOVERNMENT. 

only  practicable  self-government  on  any  large 
scale  being  electoral  and  representative,  the 
purity  of  the  ballot  becomes  a  vital  necessity. 
For  the  only  true  end  of  self-government  is 
free  government,  and  of  free  government,  pure 
government,  as  ^>f  pure  government  it  is  the 
purity,  no  less  than  the  prosperity,  of  the  whole 
people.  No  government  or  political  party  has 
ever  yet  attained  complete  purity,  because  ends 
must  wait  on  means  and  pure  government  can 
not  be  got  except  through  free  government,  nor 
free  government  except  by  self-government 

Indeed,  purity  and  freedom  are  so  interwoven 
and  identified  with  one  another  that  to  distinguish 
between  them  scarcely  separates  them  in  the 
mind.  But  a  pure  government  is  especially  one 
where  all  the  people  are  wholly  and  equally  pro 
tected  from  the  possible  corruptness  of  officials  ; 
while  a  free  government  is  one  in  which  all  civil 
classes,  in  office  or  out  of  office,  and  all  political 
parties,  in  power  or  out  of  power,  are  fully  and 
equally  protected  from  each  other.  Obviously, 
there  can  be  no  united  and  effective  effort  for 
such  pure  government,  while  an  insecurity  of 
free  government  keeps  classes  or  parties  pre 
occupied  with  one  another's  actual  or  possible 
aggressions.  Probity  is  the  one  absolute  essen 
tial  of  society's  happiness.  An  impure  govern- 


STRUGGLE  FOR  PURE  GOVERNMENT.    1 19 

ment  makes  an  impure  people,  and  pure  govern 
ment  would  be  society's  transcendent  necessity 
were  it  not  that  to  lose  free  government  is  to 
lose  both.  The  end  must  wait  on  the  means. 
Pure  government  is  pure  gold;  but  to  get  gold 
in  continuous  supply  you  must  first  have  iron. 
Free  government  is  iron — iron  and  steel.  So 
first  of  all  free  government,  and  then  pure 
government. 

Yet  we  must  confront  the  opposite  truth.  A 
government  not  free,  nor  trying  to  become  free, 
must  become  corrupt — cannot  become  pure ;  but 
even  a  free  government  cannot  remain  corrupt 
and  continue  free.  True  freedom  is  liberty  with 
equity;  corruption  is  liberty  without  equity;  and 
no  man  gets  a  freedom  he  ought  not  to  have, 
without  paying  for  it  some  other  freedom  he 
cannot  afford  to  lose.  The  Reconstruction  State 
governments  in  the  South  after  the  Civil  War 
were  set  up  on  very  broad  and  commendable 
foundations  of  free  government ;  but  not  using 
free  government  as  an  end  to  pure  government, 
they  fell,  owing  their  fall  largely  to  the  cor 
ruption  of  the  ballot,  and  actually  overthrown 
by  a  party  whose  opposing  policy  was  the  im 
practicable  proposition  of  pure  government  first, 
free  government  afterward. 

And  now,  as  to  these  things,  where  do  we, 


I2O    STRUGGLE  FOR  PURE  GOVERNMENT. 

of  America,  stand  ?  The  answer  is  not  inspiring. 
There  is  probably  not  a  State  in  our  Union  whose 
good  citizens  do  not  confess  and  lament  corrup 
tion  in  its  elections.  What  the  Governor  of  New 
York  writes  of  his  own  State  is  true  of  the  whole 
Union.  "  Bribery  and  intimidation  are  not  con 
fined  to  any  locality."  How  is  this  ? 

For  one  thing,  overlooking  the  degree  of 
freedom  attained  by  other  countries  since  we 
declared  ours,  we  have  learned  to  lay  upon  our 
freedom  the  false  charge  of  having  produced 
our  political  corruption.  Many  countries  have 
become  almost  or  quite  as  free  as  we,  even  in 
the  matter  of  suffrage,  and  are  pressing  forward, 
while  among  us  voices  are  heard  repenting  our 
rashness,  as  though  in  manhood  suffrage  we  had 
made  a  mistake  which  the  rest  of  the  world  was 
condemning.  Whether  of  the  French,  the  Ger 
mans,  the  Italians,  we  admit  or  deny  that  they 
are  as  free  as  we,  we  have  to  confess  that  such 
freedom  as  they  enjoy  is  not  a  gift  bestowed 
upon  them  by  the  purity  of  "  strong  "  govern 
ments.  It  is  a  prize  snatched  by  them  from  cor 
rupt  governments,  and  such  purification  as  they 
have  wrought  is  the  product  of  freedom.  Even 
if  they  have,  with  less  freedom  than  we,  effected 
some  larger  purifications  of  government — this 
of  the  ballot,  for  instance — still  they  have  done 


STRUGGLE  FOR  PURE  GOVERNMENT.    121 

it  on  the  plan  of  free  government  the  means, 
pure  government  the  end.  They  teach  us  not 
that  we  are  too  free,  but  only  that  we  have  been 
too  well  pleased  with  freedom  as  an  ultimate 
end. 

But  our  fathers  had  not  only  to  establish  free 
States  and  free  institutions  without  models  before 
them ;  they  had  other  great  tasks.  For  instance, 
they  had  to  learn  State  and  national  banking  and 
general  public  financiering;  and  they  learned 
them  in  a  series  of  gigantic  blunders  in  com 
parison  with  whose  devastating  results  those  of 
the  Southern  Reconstruction  governments  of 
i868-'77  sink  into  insignificance.  In  other 
words,  they  had  to  learn  how  to  vote  wisely ; 
and  no  people  ever  learned  how  to  vote  except 
by  voting. 

Moreover,  while  for  over  a  hundred  years  we 
have  had  great  freedom,  for  three-fourths  of  that 
time  we  had  also  a  great  slavery,  which  con 
stantly  threatened  the  destruction  of  true  free 
dom.  Not  that  even  the  pro-slavery  party,  what 
ever  its  leaders  may  have  been,  wanted  govern 
ment  to  be  bad,  or  free  men  to  be  less  free ;  they 
even  looked  forward — though  with  more  longing 
than  hope — to  some  indefinite  day,  when  their 
own  slaves  might  somehow  enter  into  freedom. 
Beyond  dispute,  then,  as  to-day,  a  vast  majority 


122    STRUGGLE  FOR  PURE  GOVERNMENT. 

of  the  whole  people  in  every  State  of  the  Union 
wanted  both  free  and  pure  government;  but  we 
were  divided  into  two  opposing  hosts ;  one  for 
pure  government  through  free  government,  the 
other  for  pure  government  before  free  govern 
ment.  Out  of  the  resulting  strife  has  come  the 
nation's  declaration  for  all  time,  that  pure  govern 
ment  cannot  come  before  free  government,  and 
that  not  even  in  the  name  of  pure  government 
shall  true  freedom  be  abridged. 

Another  obvious  truth  :  pure  and  free  govern 
ments  advance  by  alternating  steps,  Men  will 
not  help  others  to  set  up  pure  government  who 
refuse  them  free  government.  Nor  will  men 
help  those  to  advance  free  government  who 
refuse  them  pure  government ;  and  if  each  school 
holds  out  hostilely  against  the  other,  ruin  must 
follow ;  but  if  not,  a  patriotic  and  entirely  noble 
political  commerce  may  spring  up  between  the 
two.  A  nation  so  doing  may  have  to  see  itself 
outstripped  for  a  moment  in  the  direction  of 
free  government  by  others  less  pure,  or  of  pure 
government  by  others  less  free,  or  of  material 
wealth  by  others  neither  so  pure  nor  so  free; 
but  it  is,  nevertheless,  on  a  broader,  higher  road 
to  perfect  freedom,  purity,  and  prosperity  at  last, 
than  any  different  sort  can  possibly  be. 


STRUGGLE  FOR  PURE  GOVERNMENT.    12$ 

II. 

There  is  a  part  of  our  country,  however,  where 
conditions  are  seemingly  so  peculiar  and  excep 
tional  that  to  innumerable  minds  both  there  and 
throughout  the  nation,  no  theorizing  on  the  rela 
tions  and  necessities  of  pure  and  free  government 
can  be  made  to  appear  practicably  applicable. 
We  must  grapple  with  the  very  facts  in  this 
specific  case,  or  else  our  theorizings  are  of  no 
use  to  those  who,  in  the  North  or  South,  stand 
distraught  between  two  seemingly  antagonistic 
necessities,  the  one  for  pure,  the  other  for  free, 
governments  in  our  Southern  States. 

Even  the  initial  axiom,  that  most  men  want 
good  government,  is  denied.  Most  white  men, 
yes;  but  here  is  the  whole  lower  mass  made  up 
of  an  inferior  race  which,  we  are  assured,  neither 
knows  nor  cares  anything  about  good  govern 
ment.  So  ignorant,  unintelligent,  and  base  are 
they,  it  is  said,  that  to  give  them  any  larger  free 
dom  than  they  are  now  allowed  would  only  be 
to  make  them  easily  and  certainly  the  tools  of 
the  most  vicious  misleaders  of  popular  cupidity, 
vanity  and  passion.  To  offer  by  genuine  proffers 
of  fuller  civil  freedom  to  buy  their  cooperation 
for  measures  looking  to  purer  government,  it  is 
maintained,  would  make  them  drunk  with  self- 


124    STRUGGLE  FOR  PURE  GOVERNMENT. 

importance,  and  would  be  a  suicidal  confession 
that  the  present  ruling  class  is  not  strong  and 
pure  enough  to  establish  and  maintain  pure 
government  without  the  aid  of  the  ruled.  To 
give  the  Negro  the  same  full  civil  and  political 
freedom  that  the  white  man  has,  would,  they 
say,  be  fatal,  because  in  that  case  white  men 
would  never  divide  on  questions  of  public  policy, 
lest  the  blacks,  if  not  already  united,  should  at 
once  unite,  and  under  corrupt  leaders  seize  the 
reins  of  power. 

Now  to  these  things  what  can  we  answer? 

Let  us  take  them  seriatim.  First,  then,  as  to 
the  statement  that  virtually  the  whole  mass  of 
Negroes  in  the  South  care  nothing  for  good 
government,  we  say,  that  to  establish  such  a  vast 
exception  to  so  general  a  truth  requires  exhaus 
tive  proofs.  Where  are  they?  Reconstruction 
times  do  not  furnish  them.  They  may  show 
that  the  Reconstruction  party,  white  and  Negro, 
constantly  and  formidably  opposed  by  a  party 
exclusively  white  and  hostile  to  the  equal  civil 
liberties  of  whites  and  Negroes,  did  not  achieve, 
may  be  did  not  often  earnestly  try  to  achieve, 
purity  in  government.  But  they  do  not  prove 
that  the  Negroes  would  not  have  been  well 
pleased  to  join  pure  government  with  free.  They 
only  prove  our  premise,  that  there  can  be  no 


STRUGGLE  FOR  PURE  GOVERNMENT.    12$ 

effective  effort  for  pure  government,  while  an  in 
security  of  free  government  keeps  classes  or 
parties  occupied  with  one  another's  actual  or 
possible  aggressions.  The  great  majority  of  the 
Negroes  are  illiterate,  improvident,  reckless  and 
degraded.  But  so  is  the  Irish  peasant.  So  is 
the  Russian  serf.  The  fact  is  proof  presumptive 
that  Irish,  Russian,  or  Negro — they  are  far  more 
concerned  for  a  better  freedom,  whether  eco 
nomic,  civil  or  political,  than  for  pure  govern 
ment  ;  but  not  that  pure  government  is  some 
thing  they  would  rather  not  have. 

How  could  it  be?  Tens  of  thousands  of  them 
own  the  land  they  till,  the  houses  they  live  in. 
With  scarcely  a  very  rich  man  among  them,  they 
own  to-day  certainly  not  less  than  $100,000,000, 
some  say  $160,000,000  worth  of  taxable  wealth. 
Over  1,000,000  of  their  children,  half  their  total 
school  population,  are  enrolled  in  the  public 
schools,  where  their  average  daily  attendance  is 
more  than  600,000.  Their  principal  industry  is 
agriculture,  the  most  peaceable  and  peace-pro 
moting  labor  of  the  hand  known  to  mankind. 
Their  crops  in  the  year  1889,  unless  high  jour 
nalistic  authority  is  in  error,  aggregated  the  value 
of  $900,000,000.  Is  it  to  be  believed  that  the 
whole  mass,  or  any  preponderating  fraction  of 
such  a  people  as  this  is  so  supinely  indifferent  to, 


126    STRUGGLE  FOR  PURE  GOVERNMENT. 

or  so  abjectly  ignorant  of,  the  advantages  of 
pure  over  corrupt  government,  that  they  prefer 
the  corrupt,  other  things  being  equal  ?  And  are 
we  to  credit  this  statement  on  the  bare,  emo 
tional  declaration  of  communities  that  a  few 
years  ago — claiming  to  be  the  only  people  who 
are  in  a  position  to  understand  the  Negro — hon 
estly  believed  he  would  not  earn  his  bread  in  a 
state  of  freedom,  and  was  mentally  incapable  of 
receiving  an  ordinary  common  school  education? 
Must  we  go  even  further  and  believe  that  none 
of  them,  not  even  a  moderate  number,  care 
enough  for  the  purification  of  the  governments 
over  them  to  vote  for  pure  measures  and  good 
rulers,  even  if  these  should  boldly  declare  for  a 
removal  of  unjust  encroachments  upon  their 
public  rights  and  liberties?  Hundreds  of  thous 
ands  of  them  take  pains — not  a  few  take  risks — 
to  vote,  voting  far  oftener  for  white  men  than 
for  colored.  Do  these  prefer  corrupt  rulers  and 
measures,  and  for  mere  corruption's  sake?  The 
answer  is  familiar.  Their  leaders,  it  is  said,  do 
actually  want  corruption  for  its  own  sake,  to 
fatten  on  it,  and  in  vast  solid  masses  the  great 
black  herd  blindly  follows  these  leaders.  But 
wherein  lies  the  strange  power  of  these  leaders  ? 
In  consanguinity  ?  They  are  oftener  white  than 
colored.  In  promises  of  official  patronage? 


STRUGGLE  FOR  PURE  GOVERNMENT.    I2/ 

There  are  not  places  enough  to  go  half  around 
among  the  leaders.  How  then?  By  the  literal 
buying  of  the  ballots  ?  Ballot  buying  may  turn 
the  fortune  of  a  close  election,  but  it  can  never 
make  whole  vast  masses  of  people  vote  all  one 
way.  How  then  do  they  lead  them  ?  They  lead 
them  by  means  that  prevail,  not  because  these 
masses  are  of  Negro  race,  nor  because  they  are 
ignorant  and  degraded,  but  because  they  are 
human ;  by  means  of  promises  of  deliverance 
from  oppressive  or  offensive  public  conditions, 
from  which  they  see  other  men  profitably  free, 
and  long  themselves  to  be  delivered.  That  men 
should  be  willing  to  follow  whoever  is  for  their 
induction  into  all  and  only  the  full  measure  of 
American  freedom,  and  count  that  their  supreme 
necessity,  is  the  poorest  proof  in  the  world  that 
they  are  all  opposed  to  pure  government.  It  is 
rarely,  if  ever,  said  that  the  Negroes  have  no 
patriotism.  But  patriotism  inevitably  implies 
some  worthy  measure  of  desire  for  pure  govern 
ment.  Can  any  one  suppose  there  is  no  patriot 
ism  anywhere  among  8,000,000  of  people  who 
cannot  be  worried  out  of  the  country  of  their 
birth  ?  The  assertion  that  the  whole  mass  of 
Negroes  in  the  South  is  inimical  to  pure  govern 
ment,  is  emotional,  not  rational. 


128    STRUGGLE  FOR  PUKE  GOVERNMENT. 


III. 

But  we  have  next  the  assertion  that  they 
would  become  so  if  the  hand  of  suppression 
were  withdrawn.  This  is  a  very  ancient  argu 
ment.  A  century  ago  it  was  believed  and  prac 
tically  applied  against  millions  of  white  men,  just 
as  it  is  now  urged  against  millions  of  Negroes, 
and  was  based  on  the  same  specious  assumption, 
that  the  ignorant,  unintelligent  and  unmoneyed 
man  is  virtually  in  all  cases  dangerous  to  society 
and  government,  and  most  dangerous  when  in 
vested  with  civil  and  political  liberty.  Nor  was 
its  repudiation  any  rash  leap  taken  initially  by 
our  own  country  in  the  heat  of  revolution. 
Manhood  suffrage,  even  for  white  citizens  of  the 
United  States,  is  barely  seventy-five  years  old, 
and  of  all  the  earlier  States  of  the  Union,  is 
youngest  in  New  England.  To-day,  except  only 
Russia  and  one  or  two  others  less  notable,  every 
white  man's  government  in  the  world  has  either 
reached  or  is  steadily  moving  toward  manhood 
suffrage.  The  republics  of  South  and  Central 
America,  some  of  which  are  not  purely  white 
men's  governments  at  all,  are  well  along  on  the 
same  road,  and  wherever  they  have  also  shaken 
off  the  slavery  of  slaveholding  and  the  fetters  of 
ecclesiastical  tyranny,  are  rising  into  commer- 


STRUGGLE  FOR  PURE  GOVERNMENT.    1 29 

cial  and  political  greatness.  Yet  we  must  still 
meet  the  same  argument,  long  overturned  as  to 
white  men,  but  readapted  and  made  special 
against  Negroes  as  so  far  exceeding  white 
men  in  cupidity,  vanity  and  passion,  that  what 
political  experiment  may  have  proved  even  as  to 
ignorant,  unintelligent  and  unmoneyed  white 
men,  is  not  thereby  made  even  supposably  pos 
sible  as  to  Negroes. 

The  loose  assertions  offered  to  support  this 
assumption  we  deny.  We  deny  that  this  utter 
and  manifest  unfitness  of  the  Negro  is  believed 
by  all  respectable  Southern  white  men.  All 
through  the  South  there  are  worthy  white  men 
who  deny  that  the  experiment  need  be  futile 
or  disastrous.  We  deny  that  Southern  white 
men  by  virtue  of  close  daily  contact  with  the 
Negro  in  multitude  are  so  exclusively  able  to 
decide  this  point,  that  their  word  ought  to  be 
final.  Some  men  may  be  too  far  off,  but  just  as 
certainly  others  may  be  too  near,  to  decide  it 
uncounselled ;  and  in  fact  every  great  step  thus 
far  taken  towards  the  Negro's  real  betterment 
has  been  first  proposed  by  those  remote  from 
him  while  it  has  been  condemned  as  idle  or 
dangerous  by  those  nearest  him.  We  deny  that 
the  experiment  of  full  civil  and  political  liberty 
has  ever  been  fairly  tried  on  the  Negroes  of  the 

10 


130    STRUGGLE  FOR  PURE  GOVERNMENT. 

South.  One  thing  has  always  been  lacking,  the 
want  of  which  has  made  the  experiment  a  false 
and  unfair  trial.  It  always  lacked  the  consent — 
it  had  the  constant  vehement  opposition — of 
almost  the  whole  upper  class  of  society  in  the 
commonwealth  where  the  freedman's  new  and 
untried  citizenship  rested.  Without  land-owner 
ship,  commerce,  credit,  learning,  political  or 
financial  experience,  the  world's  acquaintance 
and  esteem,  the  habit  of  organization,  or  any 
other  element  of  political  power  except  the  naked 
ballot  and  the  ability  to  appeal  at  last  resort  to 
the  Federal  authority,  and  with  almost  the 
whole  upper  class  of  society,  and  well  nigh  all 
these  elements  of  power  skillfully  arrayed  against 
them,  the  Negroes,  accepting  the  party  leader 
ship  and  fellowship  of  any  and  every  sort  of 
white  man  who  would  only  recognize  their  new 
tenure  of  rights,  took  up  the  task,  abandoned  to 
them  in  confident  derision  by  their  former  mas 
ters,  of  establishing  equal  free  government  for  all, 
in  the  States  whose  governments  had  never  be 
fore  been  free  to  other  than  white  men.  The 
resulting  governments  were  lamentably  corrupt. 
But  it  was  the  day  of  Tweed,  rings  and  Credit 
Mobiliers,  great  and  small,  the  climacteric  hour 
of  official  corruption  throughout  a  whole  nation 
hitherto  absorbed  in  the  rougher  work  of  estab- 


STRUGGLE  FOR  PURE  GOVERNMENT.    13! 

lishing  a  complete  freedom.  Even  so  they  began 
to  rise  on  broader,  truer  foundations  of  political 
liberty  and  equity  than  had  ever  been  laid  in 
those  States  before  :  and  certainly  no  people,  even 
when  not  antagonized  by  the  great  bulk  of  a 
powerful  class  above  them,  ever  set  up  both  free 
and  pure  government  in  the  first  twelve  years  of 
their  bodily  emancipation  or  the  first  nine  years 
of  their  enfranchisement.  Another  twelve  years 
has  passed,  with  the  Negroes'  political  power 
nullified,  and  the  white,  intelligent,  wealth  hold 
ing  class  in  uninterrupted  control ;  and  still  that 
class  is  longing  and  groping  in  vain  for  pure 
government,  and  is  confessedly  farther  from  it  at 
the  end  of  its  twelfth  year  of  recovered  control 
than  it  was  at  the  end  of  its  first,  while  the  prin 
ciples  of  free  government  are  crowded  back  to 
where  they  were  twenty  years  ago.  No,  it  is 
not  the  admission  of,  it  is  the  refusal  to  admit, 
the  Negro  into  political  co-partnership — not 
monopoly — on  the  basis  of  a  union  of  free  and 
pure  governments,  that  has  produced  the  very 
conditions  which  it  was  argued  such  admission 
would  precipitate. 

It  was  this  refusal  that  threw  him,  intoxicated 
with  more  importance  and  power  than  either 
friend  or  foe  intended  him  to  have,  into  the  arms 
of  political  hypocrites  and  thieves.  It  is  this 


132    STRUGGLE  FOR  PURE  GOVERNMENT. 

refusal  that  has  demolished  with  ghastly  clear 
ness  the  truth,  counted  suicidal  to  confess,  that 
even  the  present  ruling  class  is  not  strong  enough 
or  pure  enough  to  establish  and  maintain  pure 
government  without  the  aid  and  consent  of  the 
governed.  I  admit  the  Negro  problem  is  not  al 
ways  and  only  political.  No  problem  can  be. 
It  is  not  in  the  nature  of  politics  for  any  ques 
tion  to  be  only  political.  The  Negro  question  is 
fundamentally  a  question  of  civil  rights,  includ 
ing  political  rights  as  the  fortress  of  all  the  others. 
It  is  not  always  a  peculiarly  African  proneness  to 
anarchy;  nor  is  it  always  race  instinct;  it  is 
often  only  the  traditional  pride  of  a  master-class, 
that  remands  the  Negro  to  a  separate  and  in 
vidious  tenure  of  his  civil  rights ;  but  it  is  to 
perpetuate  this  alienism  that  he  is  excluded  from 
the  political  co-partnership ;  and  it  is  the  struggle 
to  maintain  this  exclusion  that  keeps  the  colored 
vote  solid,  prevents  its  white  antagonists  from 
dividing  where  they  differ  as  to  other  measures, 
and  holds  them  under  a  fatal  One-Party  idea 
that  rules  them  with  a  rod  of  iron. 

We  see  then  how  far  the  facts  of  history  and 
present  conditions  are  from  proving  the  South 
ern  States  an  exception  to  the  rule  that  pure 
government  cannot  be  got  by  setting  its  claims 
before  and  above  free  government.  Rather,  they 


STRUGGLE  FOR  PURE  GOVERNMENT.    133 

present  these  States  as  striking  examples  of  free 
government  itself  falling  into  decay  through  the 
well-meant  but  fatal  policy  of  seeking  its  puri 
fication  by  constricting  the  rights  and  liberties  of 
the  weaker  and  inferior  ranks  of  society. 

IV. 

Washington,  bidding  a  last  farewell  to  public 
office,  and  uttering  his  parental  warnings  to  the 
people,  pronounced,  not  largeness  or  universality 
of  freedom,  nor  illiteracy,  nor  unintelligence,  but 
a  rankness  of  party  spirit  the  worst  enemy  of 
popular  government.  If  he  could  characterize 
"  the  alternate  domination  of  one  faction  over 
another"  as  "itself  a  frightful  despotism,"  what 
would  he  have  said  of  an  arbitrarily  permanent 
domination  of  one  party  over  another  and  a  cul 
mination  of  party  spirit  into  the  One-Party  idea ; 
the  idea  that  a  certain  belief  and  policy  are  so 
entirely,  surely  and  exclusively  right  that  men 
who  do  not  assent  to  them  are  incendiary,  vile, 
outrageous,  and  not  morally  entitled  to  an  equal 
liberty  and  security  under  the  laws  with  those 
from  whom  they  dissent?  A  State  ruled  by 
such  a  sentiment  is  no  longer  under  a  free 
government.  A  people  seeking  pure  govern 
ment  under  that  idea  are  trifling  with  destiny 
and  hurrying  towards  disaster,  and  in  simple 


134    STRUGGLE  FOR  PURE  GOVERNMENT. 

humanity,  if  not  in  their  own  involved  interest, 
those  who  see  their  error  ought  to  stop  them  if 
there  is  a  way  to  do  it  consistent  with  righteous 
law. 

Is  there  any  such  way  ?  Let  us  look  at  the 
situation.  The  Reconstruction  governments  in 
the  South ;  while  still  holding,  not  for  Negro 
domination,  which  they  never  held  for,  but  for 
equal  free  government  for  all,  lost  in  large  mea 
sure  the  nation's  respect  and  good-will  by  an 
acute  moral  and  financial  defalcation.  They  were 
allowed  to  be  overturned  by  measures  often 
severely  revolutionary,  on  the  assurance  of  their 
opponents  to  the  nation  and  to  the  world  that 
their  only  desire  and  design  was  pure  govern 
ment,  and  that  they  were  more  than  willing  and 
amply  able  to  furnish  it  at  once  and  follow  it 
closely  with  the  amplest  measure  of  free  govern 
ment  contemplated  in  the  Amendments  to  the 
Constitution.  Some  Southern  men  may  deny 
that  this  was  the  understanding  on  which  their 
party  was  allowed  to  retake  the  monopoly  of  its 
State  governments.  The  question  is  not  impor 
tant,  for  it  is  not  proposed  here  to  mourn  the 
extinction  of  the  Reconstruction  governments 
as  one  mourns  the  death  of  the  righteous,  nor 
to  lay  upon  the  men  who  destroyed  them  the 
whole  blame  of  the  error  committed.  Whatever 


STRUGGLE  FOR  PURE  GOVERNMENT.    135 

one  or  another's  understanding  was,  it  cannot 
for  a  moment  be  denied  that  this  was  the  hope 
and  expectation  of  the  great  North  and  West. 
The  blame — if  blame  were  worthy  of  count — 
was  on  those — whether  in  North  or  South,  in 
the  Republican,  or  Democratic,  or  any  third  or 
fourth  party — who  comforted  themselves  with 
the  delusion  that  a  policy  of  pure  government 
first,  free  government  afterward,  could  produce 
either  free  or  pure  government.  Seeing  at  last 
that  this  delusion  is  what  was  and  is  to  blame, 
the  question  who  was  to  blame — where  no  side 
was  wrong  by  choice  —  is  a  question  we  may 
sink,  with  its  answer,  forever  beneath  the  sea 
of  oblivion. 

Through  twelve  weary  and  distressful  years 
this  fallacy  has  been  given  as  fair  a  trial  as  any 
thing  ever  had,  and  to-day  more  manifestly  than 
ever  before  it  is  weighed  in  the  balances  and  found 
wanting.  For  years  the  show  and  promise  of 
better  things  joined  themselves  with  a  faith  in 
the  all-healing  power  of  time,  peace  and  material 
prosperity,  to  soothe  the  nation's  solicitude  and 
sustain  its  hope. 

The  Southern  State  governments  had  hardly 
changed  hands,  when  their  financial  credit  began 
to  rise  with  a  buoyancy  which  proved — if  such 
proof  had  been  needed — that  it  was  only  the 


136    STRUGGLE  FOR  PURE  GOVERNMENT. 

governments  repudiated  and  antagonized  by  the 
wealth-holding  portion  of  the  people  that  were 
bankrupt,  and,  whether  their  action  was  justi 
fiable  or  not,  it  was  nearer  the  truth  to  say 
the  people  had  bankrupted  the  governments 
than  that  the  governments  had  bankrupted  the 
people. 

For  a  long  time  the  sincerity  and  earnest  dili 
gence  of  the  more  intelligent  and  liberal  wing 
of  the  Southern  Conservatives  bent  itself  to  a 
most  commendable  progressive  measure ;  one 
which  had  already  been  irrevocably  begun  under 
the  Reconstruction  governments  as  an  indispen 
sable  adjunct  to  the  extension  of  civil  or  politi 
cal  freedom.  This  measure  was  the  expansion 
of  the  public  school  system,  a  system  which, 
wherever  it  has  found  large  establishment — in 
America,  England,  or  elsewhere — has  always 
followed,  not  produced,  the  extension  of  the  suf 
frage.  This  measure  was,  and  is,  practicable 
even  under  the  rule  of  the  One-Party  idea, 
because,  while  public  education  is  the  own  child 
of  the  scheme  of  free  government  first,  it  is 
almost  the  only  important  factor  of  that  scheme 
which  does  not  obviously  antagonize  the  oppo 
site  policy.  And  yet  this  opposite  policy  of  pure 
government  first  is  not,  and  by  nature  cannot  be, 
the  zealous  promoter  of  the  free  school  system 


STRUGGLE  FOR  PURE  GOVERNMENT.    137 

that  a  free  government  policy  is  sure  to  be.  A 
policy  of  freedom  first  inevitably  precipitates  and 
perpetuates  an  immediate  and  imperative  exi 
gency  which  can  be  met  only  by  an  entirely 
ample  provision  for  the  whole  people's  education. 
The  policy  of  pure  government  first,  assum 
ing  that  ignorance  and  impurity  are  much  the 
same  thing,  promises  that  ignorance  shall  there 
fore  not  participate  in  government,  and  casting 
about,  now  on  the  right  hand  and  now  on  the 
left,  for  expedients  to  prevent  it,  accepts  free 
schools  as  one,  but  with  a  divided  credence  and 
a  tame  enthusiasm.  This  is  why  the  Southern 
States  to-day  have  only  schools  enough  for  half 
their  school  population,  and  believe  they  are 
bearing  as  heavy  a  burden  of  school  tax  as  any 
people  of  equal  means  can,  while  the  States  and 
territories  of  the  West,  under  the  ideas  of  free  gov 
ernment  first  and  of  two  parties  of  equal  rights, 
are  taxing  themselves  far  heavier,  even  where 
they  have  less  wealth.  The  example  of  some  of 
these  Western  communities  is  complete  proof 
that  the  only  sense  in  which  it  can  be  said  that 
the  South  is  doing  all  it  can  for  public  education 
is  that  Southern  State  legislators  may  be  levying 
as  heavy  a  school  tax  as  they  can  reasonably  hope 
to  collect  from  a  people  lulled  by  the  assurances 
and  methods  of  a  policy  of  pure  government 


138    STRUGGLE  FOR  PURE  GOVERNMENT. 

first*  It  has  been  much  reiterated  in  the  South 
and  re-echoed  in  the  North  that  the  task  of 
public  education  in  the  Southern  States  suffers 
a  unique  and  unparalleled  drawback  in  the  fact 
that  while  the  Negroes  enjoy  nearly  half  the  out 
lay  of  the  school  funds,  almost  the  entire  amount 
of  those  funds  is  paid  by  white  taxpayers. 
But  assuming  this  to  be  quite  true  in  every  other 
regard,  there  are  two  points  in  which  it  is  not  so. 
First,  the  very  alphabet  of  economics  teaches  us 
that  all  taxes  do  not  rest  entirely  on  those  from 
whom  they  are  collected,  but  that  hundreds  of 
thousands  of  men  who  are  too  poor  to  be  found 
enumerated  on  the  tax-rolls  are  for  all  that 
reached  by  taxation  through  the  medium  of  rents 
and  similar  indirections.  And,  second,  that  the 
fact  quoted  is  far  from  being  unique  and  unpar 
alleled.  The  only  thing  peculiar  about  it  is 
that  this  lower  and  unmoneyed  mass,  which,  as 

*  The  Donaldsonville  (La.}  Chief,  of  Feb.  — ,  1890,  says: 
"  We  have  38  public  schools  in  this  parish  and  9855  scholars  to 
educate  in  them,  or  about  260  pupils  to  the  teacher  ! 

"  Taking  the  maximum  number  of  pupils  fixed  by  the  law,  it 
would  require  no  less  than  250  teachers  to  do  justice  to  the 
educational  subjects  of  the  parish.  The  '  vast  improvement '  is 
mere  brain  figment.  The  whole  yearly  school  income  for  our 
parish  is  not  much  more  than  enough  to  conduct  properly  a  suf 
ficient  number  of  schools  presided  over  by  competent  instructors 
for  thirty  days.  It  is  all  that  we  can  pay,  however." 


STRUGGLE  FOR  PURE  GOVERNMENT.    139 

a  matter  of  good  investment  in  the  whole  public 
interest,  is  in  every  State  in  the  Union  freely 
accorded  an  enjoyment  of  the  school  funds  out 
of  all  proportion  to  its  money  contributions, 
happens  in  the  South  to  be  a  distinct  race  which 
has  been  working  for  the  last  one  hundred  and 
fifty  years,  but  has  been  drawing  wages  only  for 
the  last  twenty-five. 

V. 

Another  great  progressive  measure  which 
accompanied  and  still  accompanies  the  policy 
of  pure-government-first,  though  it,  too,  began 
under  the  opposite  regime,  was  one  which  no 
policy  save  absolute  anarchy  can  ever  resent. 
This  was  the  development  of  natural  resources, 
t/he  multiplication  of  industries,  the  increase  of 
material  wealth.  The  party  that  represented 
the  bulk  of  society's  landed  and  personal 
wealth,  inspired  by  the  only  policy  it  could 
believe  to  be  honorable  or  safe,  entered  into 
entirely  new  relations  to  the  public  credit  of 
their  towns,  counties  and  States,  and  gave  the 
energy  of  a  new  hope  to  the  making  of  private 
fortunes.  The  successes  of  this  movement  have 
been  positively  brilliant.  The  unadorned  true 
stories  of  Anniston  and  Chattanooga  and  Bir 
mingham,  of  Memphis  and  Nashville,  and  At- 


140    STRUGGLE  FOR  PURE  GOVERNMENT. 

lanta  and  Richmond,  are  almost  as  romantic  as 
they  are  inspiring,  a  theme  lingered  upon  by 
Northern  tongues  and  a  Northern  press  with  a 
warmth  that  indicates  a  proper  recognition  of  the 
North's  own  great  gain  in  the  South's  prosperity. 
Nevertheless,  the  very  fullness  and  renown  of  this 
success  has  wrought  two  grave  errors.  A  saga 
cious  and  enterprising  few  may  get  rich  in  any 
country  blessed  with  natural  resources ;  but  no 
country  ever  won  or  can  win  a  large  and  perma 
nent  prosperity  save  by  the  prosperity  of  its  poor. 
No  country  can  ever  build  a  sound  prosperity 
while  it  tolerates  conditions  that  keep  a  large 
lower  mass  on  low  wages  and  long  hours.  This 
is  the  word,  not  of  politicians  alone,  but  of 
economists  and  financiers,  and  this  is  a  fact  which 
the  sunburst  of  a  sudden  great  material  develop 
ment  in  many  regions  of  the  South  has  hidden  in 
deep  shadow.  That  Southern  men,  still  so  largely 
under  the  stress  of  Southern  traditions,  should 
overlook  this  is  largely  natural  and  excusable ; 
but  that  the  North,  too,  with  its  so  wide  and 
fortunate  experience  of  better  conditions,  should 
not  see  and  point  out  the  oversight  seems  strange. 
It  may  be  doubted  that  there  is  a  high-school 
between  Boston  and  Denver  whose  pupils  are 
not  taught  that  the  greatest  source  of  the  decay 
of  nations  is  the  congestion  of  wealth  and  degra- 


STRUGGLE  FOR  PURE  GOVERNMENT.    14! 

dation  of  poverty.  No  sufficient  offsets  for  it 
have  yet  been  found  in  any  scheme  of  public 
society,  but  the  search  for  them  is  the  great 
quest  of  the  age,  and  the  safety,  peace  and  pros 
perity  of  Europe,  the  Americas,  and  the  great 
Australasian  colonies  is  mainly  due  to  the  adop 
tion  of  such  noble,  though  incomplete,  offsets 
as  have  been  found.  These  are  equal  rights  and 
protection  to  opposing  parties,  free  schools  for 
the  whole  people,  manhood  suffrage,  and  a  pure, 
free  ballot. 

Such  is  one  of  the  two  great  errors  that  have 
fastened  themselves  upon  the  otherwise  entirely 
admirable  material  development  of  the  "  New 
South."  The  other  is  twin  to  it.  It  is  that  this 
material  development  is  not  only  economically 
sound,  but  that  it  has  also  a  political  potentiality, 
and  can  of  itself  solve,  and  is  solving,  the  Southern 
problem.  Where  is  its  solution  ?  The  claim  is 
absurd.  It  is  simply  fantastical  to  expect  a  mere 
aggregation  of  private  movements  for  the  build 
ing  of  private  fortunes  to  unravel  the  snarled 
thread  of  civil  and  political  entanglements  in  a 
commonwealth.  It  may  in  self-defence  rally  to 
the  support  of  public  financial  credit ;  but  farther 
it  is  not  in  its  nature  to  go.  What  has  this  one 
done  ?  We  are  reminded  that  "  in  the  South 
there  are  Negro  lawyers,  teachers,  editors,  den- 


142    STRUGGLE  FOR  PURE  GOVERNMENT. 

lists,  doctors  and  preachers  working  in  peace 
and  multiplying  with  the  increasing  ability  of 
their  race  to  support  them."  But  whence 
came  they  ?  Nine-tenths  of  those  teachers  and 
preachers  and  ninety-nine  hundredths  of  those 
lawyers,  editors,  dentists  and  doctors  have  got 
their  professions  in  colleges  built  and  sustained  by 
Northern  money,  and  taught  by  Northern  mis 
sionary  teachers  whom  the  great  bulk  of  this  New 
South  rewards  with  social  ostracism.  They  work 
in  peace.  But  what  a  peace  !  (A  peace  bought  by 
silent  endurance  of  a  legalized  system  of  arrogant 
incivilities  that  make  them,  in  almost  every  public 
place,  conspicuous  objects  of  a  public  disdain 
which  is  not  always  even  silent.  What  single 
one  of  those  tyrannous  and  vulgar  intrusions 
of  private  social  selection  into  purely  public 
places,  has  this  New  South  of  iron  and  coal 
mines,  and  new  railways  and  cotton  mills,  and 
oil-presses  removed  ?  Not  one  !  From  the  en 
nobling  relaxations  of  the  drama,  the  opera,  the 
oratorio,  the  orchestral  symphony  and  sonata; 
from  the  edifying  diversions  of  the  popular  lec 
ture,  the  picture  gallery,  and  even  the  sacred 
service  and  sermon  of  the  popular  preacher; 
from  the  refining  comforts  of  the  first-class  rail 
way  coach  and  the  public  restaurant ;  from  the 
character  making  labors,  disciplines  and  rewards 


STRUGGLE  FOR  PURE  GOVERNMENT.    143 

of  every  academy,  college  and  even  law,  medical 
and  divinity  school,  supported  by  Southern 
money  and  attended  by  white  youth ;  and  from 
the  popular  respect  paid  to  those  who  enjoy  these 
things  and  withheld  from  those  to  whom  they 
are  forbidden,  these  "  Negro  lawyers,  teachers, 
editors,  dentists,  doctors  and  preachers,  working 
in  peace  and  multiplying  with  the  increasing 
ability  of  their  race  to  support  them,"  are  shut 
out  by  rules  sustained  by  State  legislation, 
which  refuses  to  share  even  the  Decalogue  on 
equal  terms  with  the  Negro,  but  annexes  to  it 
an  eleventh  and  "  colored  "  commandment — 
"  Thou  shalt  try  to  become  a  gentleman."  Where 
has  this  New  South  movement  opened  to  colored 
people,  paying  taxes  or  not,  professionally  edu 
cated  or  not,  the  privileges  of  a  single  public 
library  ? 

Our  attention  is  challenged  to  $900,000,000 
worth  of  crops  raised  in  the  South  last  year. 
We  are  not  told  that  the  producers  of  this  vast 
abundance  enjoy  in  one  full  and  common  mea 
sure  all  the  public  rights  declared  to  be  theirs  by 
the  national  Constitution.  That  falsehood  so 
long  believed  by  so  many  even  of  those  who 
uttered  it  in  North  and  South,  is  utterly  worn 
out.  But  we  are  asked  if  we  can  doubt  that 
such  a  product  came  from  peaceful  fields  and 


144    STRUGGLE  FOR  PURE  GOVERNMENT. 

contented  and  duly  remunerated  labor.  Yes,  we 
can !  Did  the  vast  wheat  crops  of  ancient 
Egypt  come  from  peaceful  fields  and  a  well-con 
tented  husbandry  ?  Are  her  pyramids  the  pro 
duct  of  duly  remunerated  labor  ?  Did  the  great 
crop  of  1860 — raised  when  the  Negroes  were 
half  their  present  numbers — come  from  men 
satisfied  with  their  wages?  From  the  eastern 
borders  of  Russia,  a  huge  wave  of  material  de 
velopment  is  at  present  rolling  eastward  across 
Siberia  with  an  energy  and  speed  until  lately 
supposed  by  Americans  to  be  found  only  in  our 
own  great,  free  West.  The  commerce  of  the 
Volga  rivals  that  of  the  Mississippi.  The  vol 
ume  of  trade  of  the  city  of  Nizhni  Novogorod 
rose  from  some  $60,000,000  in  1868  to  about 
$  1 20,000,000  in  1 88 1 .  A  great  through  Siberian 
railway,  to  be  completed  in  from  three  to  six 
years,  is  now  in  various  stages  of  survey  and  con 
struction,  whose  trunk  line  alone  will  stretch 
eastward  to  the  Japan  Sea,  about  5000  miles  be 
yond  Moscow.  It  runs  already  through  millions 
of  acres  of  fruitful  fields  tilled  by  an  industrious 
peasantry.  But  is  Siberia  a  free  country  ?  Spain 
is  a  land  of  harvest  and  song.  Have  the  laborers 
in  her  vineyards  and  olive-yards  a  freedom  that 
ought  to  satisfy  a  citizen  of  the  United  States  ? 
Has  America  any  class  of  society  in  which  we 


STRUGGLE  FOR  PURE  GOVERNMENT.    145 

can  afford  to  cultivate  contentment  with  a  Rus 
sian  or  a  Spanish  measure  of  civil  or  political 
liberty  ?  There  is  a  contentment  which  is  more 
intolerable  to  the  order  and  interest  of  a  free 
country  like  ours,  than  a  discontent  that  leaves 
the  ripened  grain  unharvested  to  guard  the 
rights  of  free  man.  Which  of  the  two  has  this 
industrial  development,  or  any  other  outcome  of 
the  policy  of  pure  government  first,  cherished 
and  stimulated  ?  For  twelve  years  it  has  per 
suaded  an  apparent  majority  of  the  nation  to 
leave  to  it  the  fitting  of  the  Negro  for  citizenship, 
even  refusing  national  aid  to  lift  the  burden  of 
public  education  it  counts  insupportable ;  yet  to 
this  day  it  has  made  not  the  slightest  provision 
for  admitting  any  Negro  to  the  full  measure  of 
any  civil  or  political  right  by  virtue  of  acquired 
fitness.  The  New  Orleans  Times-Democrat  of 
Nov.  5th,  says,  "The  race  issue  is  a  national  an 
tagonism  .  .  .  and  has  nothing  whatever  to  do 
with  education  or  the  lack  of  education.  To 
the  Negro  varnished  with  such  learning  as  he  is 
capable  of  acquiring,  there  is  even  a  more  pro 
nounced  antipathy  than  to  the  Negro  of  the 
cotton-field  and  kitchen."  "The  schools,"  says 
the  Atlanta  Constitution  barely  six  months  ago, 
"  have  been  in  active  operation  for  over  twenty- 
five  years,  and  it  is  estimated  that  several  hun- 
ii 


146    STRUGGLE  FOR  PURE  GOVERNMENT. 

dred  thousand  of  the  colored  voters  can  now 
read  and  write.  The  difficulties,  however,  have 
increased  with  the  progress  of  education,  and  are 
now  more  difficult  than  they  ever  were  before.  .  .  . 
Not  the  slightest  advancement  toward  an  adjust 
ment  of  the  two  races  on  political  grounds  has 
been  made  anywhere,  and  even  the  direction  of 
such  advance  is  a  matter  of  speculation."  In 
plain  words,  after  twelve  years  of  wandering 
through  a  night  of  false  political  traditions,  these 
largely  sincere  guides  to  pure  government  first 
and  free  government  afterwards,  acknowledge  at 
last  that  they  are  lost  in  the  woods  under  a  star 
less  sky. 

VI. 

The  failure  to  get  good  government  has  been 
absolutely  abject.  Not  only  has  no  material 
advance  been  made  toward  free  government, 
but  the  governments  that  started  out  twelve 
years  ago  full  of  honest  intentions  to  be  or 
become  pure,  have  grown  confessedly  corrupt, 
and  are  now  avowing  with  hardihood  or  shame 
things  that  a  few  years  ago  they  denied  with 
indignation.  Let  it  be  gladly  admitted  that  open 
personal  bribery  of  officials  is  rare.  And  natu 
rally  ;  for  where  an  upper  and  property  holding 
class  holds  secure  and  arbitrary  power  over  an 
illiterate  and  destitute  laboring  class,  and  really 


STRUGGLE  J'OR  I'URE  GOVERNMENT.    147 

desires  pure  government,  personal  official  in 
tegrity  will  still  be  demanded  after  equity  has 
been  overlooked  in  legislation ;  and  whereas  in 
the  struggle  of  an  under  class  for  better  freedom 
against  great  odds,  the  personal  impurities  of 
leaders  may  be  for  some  time  overlooked,  in  an 
effort  of  an  upper  class  for  pure  government  the 
personal  dishonesty  of  officials  will  be  the  last 
symptom  of  hopeless  and  corrupt  failure.  The 
fact  still  stands  that  the  Southern  party,  which 
really  started  in  quest  of  the  higher  grounds  of 
pure  government,  is  moving  in  a  mass  of  corrupt 
measures.  In  the  late  Prohibition  movement  in 
Georgia  its  wholesale  bribery  of  ignorant  Negro 
voters  was  open  and  boastful. 

In  Alabama,  Mississippi,  and  other  cotton 
States,  under  a  domination  which  more  and 
more  tends  to  become  merely  a  taxpayers' 
government,  there  has  sprung  up  a  system 
of  crop-lien  laws,  mainly  if  not  wholly  devoted 
to  the  protection  of  landholders  and  store 
keepers  against  farm  tenants,  so  barren  of 
counter  protections  for  the  tenant  that  they 
have  fairly  earned  the  name  given  them  by  a 
United  States  judge  in  Arkansas,  of  "anaconda 
mortgages."  Said  this  gentleman  in  an  address 
before  the  Arkansas  State  Bar  Association,  in 
1886,  "as  a  result  of  these  defective  and  bad 


148    STRUGGLE  FOR  PURE  GOVERNMENT. 

laws,  the  State  is  afflicted  with  a  type  of  money 
lenders,  traders,  and  methods  of  doing  business 
the  like  of  which  was  never  seen  before."  Quot 
ing  from  a  parliament  report  the  statement  that 
a  certain  creditor  in  Ireland  had  charged  a  Con- 
naught  peasant  a  rate  of  interest  aggregating 
43/4  Per  cent,  per  annum,  he  asked,  "  What  is 
43/4  Per  cent.  compared  to  the  profits  charged 
by  the  holders  of  anaconda  mortgages  on  tenants 
in  Arkansas  ?  They  would  scorn  43  ^  per  cent." 
And  another  member  of  the  Association  had 
already  said  of  a  signer  of  one  of  these  mort 
gages,  "  a  place  where  he  could  borrow  money 
at  usury  would  be  an  asylum  to  him  .... 
I  have  known  men — laboring  men,  farmers  and 
renters — to  pay  twenty  and  twenty-five  per  cent, 
interest  for  money  and  secure  its  payment,  rather 
than  mortgage  their  property  and  buy  supplies 
on  credit."  If  in  the  face  of  these  facts  Negroes 
are  moving  by  tens  of  thousands  from  North 
and  South  Carolina  to  Mississippi  and  Arkansas, 
that  surely  is  something  not  for  us,  but  forNorth 
and  South  Carolina  to  explain.  Probably  the 
best  explanation,  beyond  the  eager  enterprise  of 
railroad  companies,  is  that  these  ignorant  laborers, 
like  thousands  of  other  immigrants,  do  not  know 
what  they  are  going  to. 

It  will  be  said  that  the  burdens  of  this  system 


STRUGGLE  FOR  PURE  GOVERNMENT.    149 

fall  as  heavily  on  a  white  man  as  if  he  were 
black.  That  may  be,  but  it  is  a  system  unknown 
in  our  free  land  except  in  States  where  the  tenant 
class  is  mostly  Negroes,  and  just  as  far  as  white 
debtors  fall  under  it,  it  illustrates  a  fact  of  which 
it  is  far  from  being  the  only  proof;  that  this 
whole  policy  of  the  black  man's  repression  under 
a  taxpayer's  government  is  constantly  escaping 
from  its  intended  bounds  and  running  into  a 
fierce  and  general  oppression  of  the  laboring 
classes,  white  or  black.  Yet  the  wealth-holding, 
taxpaying  citizens  of  these  same  States,  still 
really  and  untiringly  bent  upon  a  large  and 
noble  renaissance  in  commerce,  industry  and 
government,  hold  conventions  and  subscribe 
money  to  promote  immigration.  Can  no  one 
make  them  understand  that  a  desirable  immi 
gration  will  never  come  to  a  land  of  long  hours, 
low  wages  and  "  anaconda  mortgages."  The 
only  way  to  make  the  South  a  good  place  for 
white  men  to  come  to  is  to  make  it  a  good 
place  for  black  men  to  stay  in. 

It  belongs  to  the  imperfections  of  human 
society  even  at  its  best,  that  as  yet,  even  under 
the  purest,  freest  conditions,  the  poor  suffer 
many  times  more  chances  than  the  rich  of  being 
legally  punished  for  criminal  errors.  Moreover, 
the  poor  man's  home  and  neighborhood  become 


150    STRUGGLE  FOR  PURE  GOVERNMENT. 

the  cesspool  and  garbage  heap  of  the  prisons' 
discharges,  pardons  and  escapes.  The  penal 
system  of  a  country  is  therefore  supremely  the 
very  poor  man's  concern,  if  not  even  his  supreme 
concern.  Hence  it  can  never  be  stripped  of  a 
political  value.  If  there  were  no  other  reason 
why  the  poor  and  ignorant  should  enjoy  the 
scant  self-protection  of  manhood  suffrage,  this 
would  be  enough.  And  with  what  clearness 
has  the  Southern  party  of  one-party-and-pu re- 
government  proved  this?  For  twelve  years 
it  has  retained  the  Convict  Lease  System,  a 
prison  system  entirely  peculiar  to  the  Southern 
States,  and  baffling  comparison  for  corrupt  and 
mortal  cruelty  with  any  system  of  prisons  be 
tween  here  and  St.  Petersburg.  It  has  not  merely 
retained  the  system.  Legislatures  and  governors 
have,  sometimes  officially,  sometimes  unofficially, 
allowed  "  penitentiary  rings J>  to  become  financial 
and  political  factors  in  the  fortunes  of  their  parties 
and  their  States,  while  all  the  better  elements  of 
the  party  and  press,  burning  with  righteous 
shame  and  resentment,  and  crying  out  against 
them,  nevertheless  endure  the  outrage  clamped 
and  riveted  upon  them  by  the  exigencies  of  a 
One-party  policy  and  the  alienation  of  the  great 
bulk  of  the  poor  man's  vote.  Nowhere  this  side 
of  Russia  and  Turkey  is  there  a  region  of  country, 


STRUGGLE  FOR  PURE  G O  VERNMENT.    I  5  I 

of  such  ratio  of  wealth  or  population,  so  reck 
lessly,  suicidally  barren  of  reformatories  for  des 
titute  and  wayward  boys  and  girls. 

But  there  are  other  fruits  of  this  well-meant 
but  vain  policy.  In  1868  the  Reconstruction 
party  in  North  Carolina  adopted,  by  a  new  con 
stitution,  the  township  system  so  well  and  favor 
ably  known  in  the  States  of  the  North  and  West. 
When  in  1875  the  party  of  pti re-government-first 
gained  power,  however  much  personal  corrup 
tion  in  office  it  may  have  found,  it  found  also 
as  perfect  a  form  of  republican  State  government 
as  there  was  in  the  Union.  Every  provision 
which  any  State  enjoyed  for  the  protection  of 
public  society  from  its  bad  members  and  bad 
impulses,  was  either  provided  or  easily  procur 
able  under  the  constitution  of  the  State.  Yet 
within  a  year  this  party,  for  the  avowed  purpose 
of  nullifying  the  power  of  their  opponents  in 
every  county  where  those  opponents  were  still  in 
the  majority,  so  amended  the  State  constitution 
as  to  take  away  the  powers  of  self-government 
from  every  county  in  the  State  and  centralize 
them  in  the  legislature  under  a  base  counterfeit 
of  the  system  of  government  displaced  by  the 
"radicals"  in  1868.  Under  this  system  —  un 
known  to  any  other  State — a  preponderance  of 
power  over  elections  and  election  returns  is  se- 


152    STRUGGLE  FOR  PURE  GOVERNMENT. 

cured  to  the  majority  in  the  State  legislature,  so 
great  that  no  party  retaining  it  can  clear  itself 
of  the  charge  of  corrupt  intentions.  In  South 
Carolina  this  same  party,  now  that  rifle  clubs 
and  tissue  ballots  have  passed  away,  confesses, 
with  the  pardonable  buoyancy  of  a  relieved  con 
science,  that  those  measures  were  intolerably 
corrupt.  Yet  the  eight-box  system  still  stands 
in  their  stead,  raising  the  same  blush  of  mortifi 
cation,  yet  commanding  from  them  the  same 
subjection  as  do  lynch  law  and  the  convict 
lease  system. 

Such  are  the  conditions  after  twelve  years  of  ef 
forts  by  an  intelligent,  accomplished,  determined, 
persistent,  heroic  people  to  hold  down  free  gov 
ernment  with  one  hand  till  they  can  set  up  pure 
government  with  the  other.  For  twelve  of  our 
modern  years,  each  one  worth  an  ancient  century, 
the  cry  of  pure  government  first  has  prevailed, 
not  only  among  themselves  but  throughout  the 
nation.  For  its  sake,  this  nation,  almost  as  uni 
versally  dazed  as  they  by  the  bright  plausibility 
of  the  mistake,  has  endured  more  deadly  out 
rages  against  its  citizens  within  its  own  borders 
than  it  would  have  tamely  submitted  to  from  all 
the  great  powers  of  the  earth  combined.  The 
mass  to  be  held  in  subjection  has  been  the  inferior 
in  numbers,  prowess,  intelligence,  wealth  and 


STRUGGLE  FOR  PURE  GOVERNMENT.    153 

every  other  element  of  military  or  political 
strength;  not  turbulent  and  ferocious,  but  on 
the  Southern  white  man's  testimony,  tractable, 
amiable,  dependent.  The  great  national  party 
that,  unhindered,  might  have  lifted  this  subjec 
tion,  has  for  twenty-five  years  found  itself  op 
posed,  and  for  the  last  twelve  years  pinioned, 
by  another  party  quite  or  almost  its  match  in 
numbers,  power,  integrity,  and  skill,  vehemently 
charging  it  with  rushing  to  the  rescue  of  free 
dom  too  rashly  for  freedom's  good.  The  class 
proposing  to  rule  the  South  alone,  is  honest 
in  purpose,  still  filled  with  the  spirit  of  free 
dom  that  gave  us  Washington,  and  yet  as  im 
perial  as  ancient  Rome.  It  is  not  they,  it  is 
only  their  policy,  that  is  found  wanting.  If  any 
people  on  earth  could  have  carried  that  policy 
to  success  they  could.  They  have  proved  for 
all  time  and  for  all  mankind  that  it  can  never 
be  done. 

The  day  in  which  this  truth  becomes  a  popu 
lar  conviction  among  our  white  brethren  of  the 
South  and  among  millions  in  the  North  whose 
conversion  waits  only  on  theirs,  will  be  the 
brightest,  gladdest,  best  day  that  ever  dawned 
on  this  continent.  I  believe  that  dawn  is  now 
breaking. 


154    STRUGGLE  FOR  PURE  GOVERNMENT. 

VII. 

True,  we  hear  voices  through  the  Southern 
press  crying  new  schemes  for  avoiding  the  sim 
ple  necessities  of  free  government:  the  establish 
ment  of  a  Negro  Territory;  a  disfranchisemcnt 
of  over  half  the  Negroes  by  an  educational 
qualification  at  the  polls ;  their  total  disfranchise- 
ment  by  the  repeal  of  the  Fourteenth  Amend 
ment;  and  in  the  very  Senate  a  proposition  to 
deport  the  Negro  to  Africa  at  the  national 
expense,  although  at  the  same  time  and  all  over 
the  South,  men  in  the  same  party  from  which 
the  project  comes  are  stating  with  new  frankness 
their  old  doctrine,  that  though  the  country  shall 
never  belong  to  the  Negro,  the  Negro  simply 
shall  belong  to  the  country.  But  the  very  for- 
lornness  of  these  absurd  projects,  built,  them 
selves,  on  open  confessions  that  the  past  is  a 
failure  and  that  something  different  must  be  done 
with  all  speed,  is  a  final  admission  that  the  party 
pledged  to  solve  the  Negro  Question  without 
consulting  the  Negro,  feels  that  it  must  change 
its  policy  or  drop  from  under  the  nation's  mis 
placed  hopes. 

The  press  of  the  nation  almost  with  one  voice 
rejects  the  scheme  of  a  Negro  territory.  We 
have  more  Negro  territories  now  than  either 


STRUGGLE  FOR  PURE  GOVERNMENT.    155 

white  men  or  Negroes  want.  Our  Indian  Terri 
tory  and  Indian  deportations  and  reservations 
have  only  wronged  the  savage,  dishonored  civil 
ization,  complicated  the  whole  Indian  question, 
and  still  hold  it  over  us  in  costly  and  bloody  sus 
pense  until  we  shall  muster  humanity  and  com 
mon  sense  enough  to  do  unto  him  as  we  would 
that  our  Southern  brother  would  do  unto  the 
Negro — cease  condescension,  bounty,  and  fraud, 
and  show  mercy,  justice  and  human  fraternity. 

The  proposition  to  repeal  the  Fourteenth 
Amendment  deserves  as  little  respect  and  atten 
tion  as  it  is  receiving.  It  would  disfranchise 
thousands  of  taxpayers  and  thousands  of  men 
able  to  read  and  write,  still  leaving  the  franchise 
with  hundreds  of  thousands  of  total  illiterates 
paying  no  direct  taxes.  It  would  simply  re 
establish  a  system  of  irrational  race  discrimina 
tion.  It  is  well  for  the  honor  of  the  good  State 
of  Mississippi,  where  the  proposition  has  arisen, 
that  along  with  it  comes  word  that  at  last  an 
attempt  has  been  made,  with  some  hope  of 
permanent  success,  to  abolish  in  that  State  the 
Convict  Lease  System. 

As  to  the  South  Carolina  scheme  to  limit  the 
suffrage  by  an  educational  qualification,  it  seems 
to  have  died  at  birth,  smothered  under  the  evi 
dent  fact  that  a  State,  nearly  half  of  whose  people 


156    STRUGGLE  FOR  PURE  GOVERNMENT. 

are  illiterate  and  nearly  half  of  whose  population 
of  school  age  are  without  public  provision  against 
illiteracy,  has  no  reason,  as  it  has  no  right,  to 
hope  for  an  honest  vote  to  disfranchise  the  illiter 
ate.  Well  for  it  that  there  is  no  such  hope.  For  no 
people  ever  escapes  the  incubus  of  a  large  illiter 
acy  in  its  poorer  classes  except  by  providing  a 
system  of  public  education  ample  for  the  whole 
people ;  the  demand  for  ample  free  education  is 
created  not  by  the  contraction,  but  by  the  en 
largement,  of  the  right  of  suffrage.  The  most 
suicidal  thing  a  party  of  free  education  can  do  is 
to  favor  an  educational  qualification  of  the  suf 
frage  before  free  education  is  amply  supplied;  for 
whenever  the  issue  is  between  adequate  and 
inadequate  provision  the  vote  that  tips  the  scale 
aright  is  just  the  bugbear  itself — the  illiterate 
man's  vote. 

I  hold  that  to  prove  the  moral  wrong  of  a 
thing  is  to  prove  just  so  far  its  practical  worth- 
lessness.  To  disfranchise  the  illiterate  is  to  make 
the  most  defenceless  part  of  a  community  more 
defenceless  still.  There  is,  I  know,  an  educa 
tional  qualification  in  Massachusetts,  and  there 
are  a  few  illiterates.  But  there  is  no  illiterate 
class,  and  the  educational  qualification  here  is 
not  mainly  for  the  protection  of  the  suffrage,  but 
a  correctional  punishment  for  inexcusable  igno- 


STRUGGLE  FOR  PURE  GOVERNMENT.    157 

ranee.  The  dangers  of  illiteracy  have  been 
almost  as  much  overstated  as  its  economic  loss 
has  been  overlooked.  Far  the  greatest  danger 
in  a  wide  illiteracy  is  to  the  illiterate  themselves, 
and  though  there  are  reciprocal  risks,  the  supreme 
urgency  for  its  removal  is  not  their  dangerous- 
ness  to  the  more  fortunate  and  powerful  classes, 
but  the  dangerousness  of  those  classes  to  them. 
As  for  the  Australian  ballot  system,  wherever  in 
this  great  union  of  States  it  goes  for  the  better 
liberty  of  every  honest  voter,  learned  or  ignorant, 
rich  or  poor,  and  for  the  confusion  of  bribers  and 
bribe-takers,  learned  or  ignorant,  rich  or  poor, 
may  God  give  it  good  speed.  But,  alas  !  for  pub 
lic  liberty,  purity  or  safety,  wherever  it  is  put 
into  use  to  abridge  the  right  of  suffrage.  No 
people  is  justly  ready  for  a  system  of  elections 
that  prevents  the  voting  of  the  illiterate  man 
until  it  has  first  provided  full  public  facility  for 
every  such  man  to  learn  to  read  and  write,  and 
has  then  given  him  fair  warning  and  time  to 
learn. 

The  last  and,  it  seems  to  me,  the  most  irra 
tional  scheme  of  all,  is  that  embodied  in  the 
Bill  for  the  deportation  of  Negroes  to  Africa. 
The  graceful  arguments  of  its  advocates  in  the 
Senate  have  been  fully,  ably,  brilliantly  answered 
in  the  Senate,  and  there  is  no  excuse  for  more 


158    STRUGGLE  FOR  PURE  GOVERNMENT. 

than  a  word  to  the  point  here.  The  early  admis 
sions  and  confessions  of  Abraham  Lincoln  have 
been  much  used  in  this  debate  by  excellent  men, 
who  still  repudiate  and  antagonize  the  conclu 
sions  of  his  latest  wisdom  as  they  once  did  his 
earlier.  Let  us  in  that  wonderful  spirit  of  more 
than  Washingtonian  generosity  which  made  him 
impregnable  and  irresistible  in  debate,  make 
every  supposition  of  the  advocates  of  deporta 
tion  that  can  be  supposed.  Say  the  bill  is  found 
to  be  not  unconstitutional ;  that  hundreds  of 
thousands  of  Negroes  want  to  go,  and  that 
Southern  white  men  generally  will  let  them  go, 
despite  the  palpable  fact  that  the  men  most 
likely  to  go  will  be,  to  use  an  old  Southern  word, 
the  most  "  likely "  men,  the  men  of  health, 
strength,  self-reliance,  enterprise,  and  despite, 
again,  the  fact  that  no  large  emigration  can  take 
place  without  carrying  away  millions  of  ready 
money  with  it.  Every  100,000  of  European 
emigrants  to  this  country  bring  about  $8,000,000 
with  them.  The  industrial  value  of  100,000  un 
skilled  laborers  is  $80,000,000.  Is  a  white  immi 
gration  likely  to  make  up  such  losses  ?  Let  us 
suppose  even  this,  although  no  one  ever  yet 
heard  of  one  set  of  emigrants  pouring  into  a 
country  from  which  a  poorer  set  was  pouring 
out ;  and  although  if  they  will  come  at  all  there 


STRUGGLE  FOR  PURE  GOVERNMENT.    159 

is  abundance  of  room  for  them  now,  without 
deporting  a  single  Negro. 

What  shall  we  say  ?  We  say  pass  your  bill ; 
get  your  ships  ready ;  proclaim  free  passage  to 
whomsoever  will  accept  it.  Only  let  there  be 
no  compulsion.  As  a  whole  nation  we  are 
branded  with  our  fathers'  sin  of  bringing  these 
people  here ;  let  us  not  now  add  to  that  our  own 
sin  of  driving  them  back.  Therefore,  no  compul 
sions.  But  the  land  is  full  of  compulsions.  The 
main  argument  for  the  Negroes  going  is  that  we 
are  making  their  stay  here  intolerable  to  them. 
Before  wre  buy  or  hire  one  ship,  whether  these 
compulsions  are  in  South  Carolina  or  Mississippi, 
Illinois,  Ohio  or  Massachusetts,  let  the  compul 
sions  be  removed.  When  State  and  Federal  gov 
ernments  have  exhausted,  as  neither  has  yet  done, 
all  their  powers  of  legislation  and  police  to  make 
the  Negro  in  America  as  free  as  the  white  man, 
then,  if  the  Negro  cannot  be  content,  and  the  peo 
ple  choose  to  bear  the  expense  of  his  deportation, 
let  the  folly  be  charged  to  him,  not  us,  of  leav 
ing  a  free  land  to  which  better  men  were  glad  to 
come  and  fill  his  voided  place.  But  let  this 
nation  never  again  open  the  Sacred  Scriptures 
on  Independence  Day,  or  on  the  birthday  of 
Washington  lift  up  its  hands  to  God,  if,  as  mat 
ters  now  stand,  it  provides  money  or  ships  for 


l6o    STRUGGLE  FOR  PURE  GOVERNMENT. 

the  flight  back  to  Africa  of  the  victims  of  its 
own  tyrannies.  This  is  not  the  way  to  settle,  but 
only  to  delay  and  hinder  the  settlement  of  the 
Negro  question.  Emigrants  have  been  pouring 
out  of  Ireland  for  forty  years,  and  their  Govern 
ment  has  encouraged  their  going,  and  still  Ire 
land  is  full  of  Irish  and  the  Irish  Question  is 
not  settled.  Pass  your  Deportation  Bill.  Help 
hundreds  of  thousands  of  able-bodied  Negroes 
to  sail  to  Africa.  But  unless  you  remove  the 
already  existing  compulsions  upon  which  you 
are  counting  to  drive  them  on  shipboard,  the 
white  immigrant  will  not  come  to  take  his  place, 
and  the  Negro  and  the  Negro  Question  will  be 
with  us  still. 

It  is  true,  also,  that  the  infatuation  for  buying 
pure  government  at  some  other  price  than  the 
Negro's  civil  freedom  and  political  cooperation 
still  maintains  the  iron  rule  of  the  one-party  idea. 
It  is  to  this  sentiment  and  policy  that  we  owe 
the  enormities  of  Lynch-law,  with  its  record  of 
crimes  beyond  all  cavil  darker  and  fouler  than 
all  the  robberies  of  Carpet-bag  Governments. 
For  these  murderous  deeds  are  committed  only 
because  the  lovers  of  order  and  pure  government 
make  no  serious  effort  to  prevent  them,  and 
these  make  no  serious  effort  only  because  to 
punish  these  murderers  would  break  the  solid 


STRUGGLE  FOR  PURE  GOVERNMENT.    l6l 

square  of  that  one  party  which  makes  simple 
dissent  from  its  doctrines  infamous  and  criminal, 
the  only  party  that  ever  has  dared  to  declare 
openly  to  this  free  nation  that  it  must  and  will 
rule,  whether  it  represents  a  majority  of  the 
people  or  not.  Is  not  that  the  very  germinating 
and  perpetuating  principle  of  political  corrup 
tion  ?  Under  what  strange  skies,  on  what  dis 
tant  planet,  can  we  believe  that  such  a  tree  will 
put  forth  the  flowers  and  fruit  of  pure  govern 
ment? 

In  Nashville  lately  a  gentleman  of  the  south 
ern  political  orthodoxy  gave  me  this  story  as 
strict  fact :  A  traveller,  similarly  orthodox,  sat 
down  at  the  large  supper-table  of  an  Arkansas 
tavern.  The  landlord  bearing  two  large  steam 
ing  covered  vessels,  identical  in  size  and  pattern, 
one  in  each  hand,  passed  from  guest  to  guest 
with  always  the  same  hospitable  offer  of  choice : 
"  Tea  or  Coffee  ?"  "  Tea  or  Coffee."  "  Coffee," 
said  one.  He  poured  coffee.  "  Coffee,"  said  a 
second.  He  poured  coffee.  "  Coffee,"  said  a 
third,  fourth  and  fifth.  Again  once,  twice, 
thrice,  the  tea-pot  was  deferentially  drawn  back 
and  the  coffee-pot  poured  forth  its  strong,  black 
flood.  So  our  traveller  was  reached.  "  Tea  or 
coffee?"  "Tea."  The  landlord  drew  back 
bristling,  but  the  next  instant  was  gracious 

12 


1 62    STRUGGLE  FOR  PURE  GOVERNMENT. 

again.  He  brought  the  huge  tea-pot  nimbly 
forward  and  poured  from  it  the  same  hot,  rank 
"  Rio "  that  he  had  been  pouring  from  the 
other  pot,  saying  as  he  poured,  "  tea !  in  Ar 
kansas  !  No  sir.  In  Arkansas  you  take  cof 
fee  or  you  take  nothing."  Our  traveller  drank 
it  without  milk.  It  was,  after  all,  simply  his 
own  one-party  idea  and  he  had  to  swallow  it. 

VIII. 

But  if  the  One-party  idea  still  rules  in  the 
South,  men  are  longing  and  reaching  out  for 
deliverance  from  it  now  as  they  have  not  done 
before  since  thirty  years  ago  it  first  laid  its  com 
plete  bondage  upon  them.  From  out  the  South 
itself  has  lately  been  heard  a  strange,  new,  most 
worthy  and  most  welcome  sound,  the  voices  of 
southern  white  leaders  of  thought  and  action 
charging  upon  the  North  the  duty  and  necessity 
of  helping  the  South  to  solve  the  simple  question 
which  the  northern  and  southern  seekers  after 
pure  government  through  race-rule  and  post 
poned  rights  have  snarled  into  a  bewildering  pro 
blem.  This  problem  has  been  drawn  into  the 
open  field  of  literary  debate,  a  field  from  which, 
in  these  enlightened  days,  no  practical  question 
can  escape  until  it  is  solved.  But  the  question 


STRUGGLE  FOR  PURE  GOVERNMENT.    163 

is  no  longer  how  this  problem  should  be  set 
tled  ;  it  is  only  how  to  persuade  men  to  settle  it. 

As  to  this,  let  us  first  of  all,  stop  blaming  one 
another;  let  us  blame  things  not  men;  ill  con 
ditions,  false  theories,  bad  schemes.  Even  among 
these  let  us  waste  no  more  wrath,  no  more  grief, 
no  more  time,  over  such  as  are  done  and  can 
never  be  undone ;  but  give  ourselves  faithfully, 
fraternally,  unflinchingly  to  the  pursuit  and  de 
struction  of  every  living  evil  in  theory  or  prac 
tice. 

In  the  second  place  the  new  material  develop 
ment  of  the  South  must  go  on.  If  wealth  does 
not  necessarily  make  a  people  free  or  virtuous, 
neither  does  poverty.  But  thinking  men  in  the 
South  must  rouse  themselves  to  the  economic 
and  political  necessity  for  a  wider  diffusion  of 
wealth  and  more  prosperous  conditions  of  manual 
labor.  The  inattention  to  the  study  of  Econ 
omics  in  most  southern  colleges  amounts  to  a 
calamity.  To  the  spirit  that  prompts  this  is 
largely  owing  a  superficial  treatment  of  com 
mercial  and  industrial  conditions  that  character 
izes  the  greater  part  of  the  southern  press,  and 
misleads  a  large  class  among  the  southern  capi 
talists  of  commerce  and  the  industries,  who 
count  only  themselves  practical. 

And  again,  the  struggle  for  pure  government 


1 64    STRUGGLE  FOR  PURE  GOVERNMENT. 

must  be  neither  abandoned  nor  abated.  Only 
the  effort  to  procure  it  at  the  expense  of  free 
government  must  be  abandoned.  Free  govern 
ment,  the  equal  freedom  of  all  in  all  public  rela 
tions,  must  be  recognized  as  its  foremost  and 
supreme  necessity.  Yet  we  do  not  demand  a 
sudden  and  complete  revolution  of  southern 
sentiment  and  policy.  All  the  nation  is  really 
impatient  for  is  to  see  the  South  once  turn  and 
start  in  the  right  direction. 

To  this  end  let  it  be  understood  and  declared 
in  southern  circles,  councils,  newspapers,  that 
in  the  southern  States,  just  as  truly  as  in  Kan 
sas,  Ohio,  or  Massachusetts,  a  man  can  favor  the 
Negro's  enjoyment  of  a  white  man's  public 
rights  without  being  either  a  Republican  or  a 
traitor.  He  can  be  an  Equal-rights  Democrat. 
I  venture  to  say  that  the  great  bulk  of  the  Re 
publican  party  itself  will  look  with  more  respect 
and  pleasure  upon  a  band  of  southern  opponents 
declaring  themselves  Equal-rights  Democrats, 
than  upon  a  like  reinforcement  to  its  own  ranks 
of  Alabama  protectionists  trying  to  take  the  piti 
fully  impossible  pose  of  color-line  Republicans. 

If  men  cannot  reconcile  it  to  their  self-regard 
or  sense  of  expediency  to  declare  for  equality  in 
all  public  rights  at  once,  let  them  try  a  few  at  a 
time.  Since  1865  the  South  has  found  on  ex- 


STRUGGLE  FOR  PURE  GOVERNMENT.     165 

periment,  sometimes  voluntary,  sometimes  other 
wise,  a  great  many  things  consistent  with  honor, 
safety  and  peace  that  they  had  looked  upon  with 
loathing  and  alarm.  Why  not  try  a  few  more  ? 
Take,  at  random,  any  phase  of  the  matter ;  for 
instance,  railroad  accommodation.  If  in  every 
southern  town  Negroes  may  ride  in  street-cars, 
where  people  crowd  one  another  and  no  separate 
place  offers  to  the  rag-tag  that  refuge  from  the 
better  kept  which  they  always  covet,  why  not 
try  making  first-class  railway  coaches  equally 
free  to  all  kinds  of  people  decent  in  person  and 
behavior,  and  require  all  kinds  of  rag-tag  to  ac 
cept  other  accommodations  ?  There  is  no  risk  in 
such  a  step ;  nobody  really  believes  there  is  any, 
it  is  purely  a  matter  of  pride.  But  be  it  pride  or 
be  it  risk,  the  street-cars  offered  the  extreme 
case,  and  in  them  the  question  has  long  been 
settled. 

Or  take  another  case.  Probably  the  most 
indefensible,  wanton,  cruel  deprivations  suffered 
by  Southern  colored  people  on  the  score  of  race 
is  their  exclusion  from  the  privileges  of  the 
public  libraries.  Let  these  excommunications 
from  the  pure  wells  of  inspiration  that  are  in 
good  books  be  withdrawn.  Let  decent  white 
Southerners  say  to  decent  colored  Southerners, 
These  concessions — or  such  as  these — will  we 


1 66   STRUGGLE  FOR  PURE  GOVERNMENT. 

make  to  you  if  you  will  join  with  us  politically 
for  pure  men  and  purifying  measures.  That 
were  a  buying  of  votes  without  dishonor  to 
either  side;  and  tens  of  thousands  of  colored 
votes,  both  of  those  that  money  can,  and  that 
money  cannot  buy,  can  be  bought  at  that  price. 
Only  let  it  not  be  fancied  that  even  Negroes  are 
going  to  be  outwitted  more  than  once  or  twice 
by  promises  that  if  they  will  concede  something 
now,  their  white  fellow-citizens  will  concede 
something  to  them  by-and-by.  Says  the  Rev. 
Dr.  Thirkield,  of  Atlanta,  in  a  late  allusion  to 
the  failure  of  the  Prohibition  movement  in  that 
city,  "The  Negro  was  recognized  as  a  factor  in 
the  great  civil  contest ;  he  was  met  as  a  man 
and  a  brother ;  promises  were  given  him  as  to 
his  civil  rights  in  the  conduct  of  the  city  govern 
ment.  Through  his  vote  the  campaign  closed 
in  victory.  Then  the  contact  between  the  two 
races  was  broken  off;  recognition  and  coopera 
tion  in  civil,  moral  and  religious  work  ceased ; 
pledges  as  to  his  civil  rights  were  broken.  The 
rum  power  saw  its  opportunity,  ....  organ 
ized  for  victory,  and  brought  again  the  reign  of 
rum."  So  it  may  always  be ;  there  is  a  vote  that 
divides  but  not  destroys ;  and  there  is  another 
that  solidifies  but  does  not  save. 

True,  to  influence  the  colored  vote  men  must 


STRUGGLE  FOR  PURE  GOVERNMENT.    1 67 

influence  its  leaders.  But  such  concessions  as  we 
have  mentioned  are  the  daily  spoken,  written,  and 
printed  demands  of  every  sort  of  colored  leader, 
even  of  those  who  are  accused  of  being  influenced 
by  nothing  except  the  prospect  of  public  office 
or  its  equivalent  in  cash.  A  full  numerical 
share  of  public  offices,  clerkships  and  contracts 
is  not,  and  never  was,  the  ultimatum  of  the  vast 
colored  vote,  nor  even  of  its  colored  leaders. 
They  certainly  never  got  it.  No  party  ever 
promised  them  that  all  or  half  or  one-fourth  of 
them  should  have  offices  or  appointments,  or 
ever  gave  them  all  or  half,  if  even  a  fourth  of 
the  offices  or  appointments.  But  for  the  hostility 
of  the  great  majority  of  Southern  white  men  to 
an  equality  of  public  rights,  no  colored  leader 
need  ever  have  been  given  an  office  or  appoint 
ment  which  he  could  not  reasonably  have  been 
expected  to  fill  with  credit  and  honor.  With 
genuine  and  coveted  concessions  offered  to  them 
in  the  matter  of  civil  rights,  colored  voters  will 
not  be  long  finding  leaders  to  whom  it  will  be 
enough  to  concede  with  sincere  and  practical 
intent,  that  merely  being  a  Negro  is  not  an 
insurmountable  bar  to  the  holding  of  office  by 
one  otherwise  qualified. 

Let  the   lovers   of  pure   government   in    the 
South  make  such  experiments.     It  can  be  made 


1 68    STRUGGLE  FOR  PURE  GOVERNMENT. 

in  small  or  large.  There  are  towns,  townships, 
counties,  even  States,  one  or  two,  in  the  South, 
where  the  two  national  parties  are  nearly  equal 
in  numbers.  There,  as  elsewhere,  the  Negro 
cares,  as  he  should,  far  more  about  his  own  civil 
and  political  rights  than  about  who  gets  into 
the  White  House.  In  such  a  region  a  party  of 
pure  government  ought,  by  reasonable  and  gen 
erous  concessions  to  a  better  and  more  equal 
freedom,  to  gain  enough  colored  votes  to  enable 
it  advantageously  to  sacrifice  some  very  bad 
white  ones.  Only,  these  concessions  must  be 
made  in  the  spirit  and  guise,  not  of  condescen 
sion  and  protection,  but  of  civil  and  political 
equality  and  fellowship,  entering  frankly  and 
fully  into  council  with  the  Negro's  recognized 
leaders,  white  or  colored,  appealing  to  such  as 
are  "  out  of  politics,"  only  when  those  who  are 
in  politics  will  not  listen  to  reason.  Say  what 
you  will  of  party  leaders  and  managers,  the  great 
Republican  party  itself  would  rather  be  hope 
lessly  outnumbered  and  defeated  in  Mississippi 
or  South  Carolina  by  fair  means  in  the  interest 
of  free  government,  than  to  see  a  Republican 
majority  tyrannously  defrauded  under  the  pre 
tence  of  procuring  or  upholding  pure  govern 
ment.  Nor  do  I  doubt  the  great  Democratic 
party  also  would,  in  its  turn,  rather  be  so  out- 


STRUGGLE  FOR  PURE  GOVERNMENT.    169 

numbered  and  defeated,  than  to  see  its  managers 
win  victory  at  the  price  of  honor. 

But  if  southern  white  men  will  not  even  yet  of 
their  own  motion  give  this  method  of  healing 
"the  nation's  running  sore,"  a  fair  trial,  there 
are  still  two  ways  by  which  such  a  trial  may  be 
had.  One  is  a  means  which  no  generous  mind 
in  this  nation  would  make  other  than  its  last 
choice.  I  mean,  of  course,  Federal  intervention. 

I  earnestly  protest  I  have  learned  too  much 
from  the  teachings  of  Washington  ever  to  be  a 
partisan.  On  the  race  question  I  am  a  Republi 
can  ;  on  some  others  I  am  a  Democrat,  and  on 
all  questions  I  know  and  am  ready  to  avow  ex 
actly  where  I  stand.  The  southern  party  for 
pure  government  first  has  been  given  the  best 
twelve  years  that  ever  shone  on  earth,  in  which 
to  make  Federal  intervention  unnecessary,  and 
has  so  utterly  failed,  that  it  is  to-day  seen  asking 
in  the  United  States  Senate  for  a  species  of 
Federal  intervention  by  no  means  the  safest  or 
best  or  most  constitutional,  to  help  it  to  remove 
bodily  to  Africa  the  problem  whose  obvious 
solution  it  will  not  allow  even  to  be  tried.  I  do 
not  favor  Federal  intervention  for  the  establish 
ment  of  equal  civil  and  political  rights  in  any 
State  whatever,  except  as  a  last  resort.  As  to 
Federal  elections,  at  least,  it  is  a  right  placed 


I/O    STRUGGLE  FOR  PURE  GOVERNMENT. 

beyond  cavil  by  the  plain  letter  of  the  Constitu 
tion.  But  even  there  the  intention  that  it  should 
be  never  other  than  an  unpreferred  alternative  is 
plain. 

Yet  I  see  to-day  only  one  alternative  inter 
vening.  Of  it  I  shall  speak  in  a  moment.  But 
for  this  alternative,  it  seems  to  me  totally  in 
compatible  with  the  dignity  and  honor  of  this 
nation,  that,  after  twelve  years  of  amiable,  hope 
ful  waiting,  it  should  let  itself  be  kept  indefinitely 
waiting  still  for  admission  to  its  own  simplest 
rights  by  the  plausible  and  eloquent  door 
keepers  of  a  do-nothing  policy.  A  despair  that 
prompts  to  action  and  deliverance  is  better  than 
any  false  hope,  and  if  such  a  despair  moves  this 
nation,  this  year  or  next,  to  the  action  it  has 
borne  so  much  to  avoid,  it  can  point  to  these 
door-keepers,  whether  they  be  of  North  or  South, 
and  say,  the  blame  of  it  and  the  shame  of  it  be 
on  you ! 

The  only  alternative  I  see,  a  hope  of  whose 
adoption  can  rightly  postpone  Federal  interven 
tion  any  longer,  is  for  the  Democratic  party  of 
the  wide  North  and  West  to  withdraw  its  sup 
port  from  the  southern  policy  now,  as  it  did  in 
1860.  Said  one  of  the  national  Democratic 
leaders  to  me  a  few  years  ago,  "  That  is  what 
we  have  got  to  do.  The  votes  we  lose  by  it  in 


STRUGGLE  FOR  PURE  GOVERNMENT.     171 

the  South  will  be  more  than  offset  by  those  we 
shall  gain  in  the  North."  But  I  maintain  the 
case  is  better  for  them  than  this.  They  will  gain 
votes  in  the  North ;  but  they  will  no  more  lose 
the  southern  white  vote  than  they  lost  it  when 
with  cannon,  bayonets  and  sabres  they  forced  it 
back  into  the  Union  from  which  it  had  seceded. 
Who  will  say  that  promptness  on  this  point  now 
may  not  save  them  from  another  such  long  va 
cation  as  procrastination  cost  them  in  1860? 

We  have  yet  two  years  and  a  half  before  the 
next  presidential  election,  in  1892.  Let  it  be 
hoped  and  urged  that  before  then  the  believers 
in  pure  government  instead  of,  or  before,  free 
government  will  of  their  own  choice  abandon 
their  utterly  self-condemned  and  futile  policy,  and 
make  at  least  a  visible  and  appreciable  beginning 
upon  that  experiment  of  equal  rights  for  all  men 
and  all  parties,  which,  in  the  modern  world,  at 
least,  has  never  failed  on  fair  trial.  Has  never 
failed ;  no,  and  would  not  fail  in  Hayti  or  San 
Domingo  themselves,  if  they  would  once  give  it 
the  supremacy  thus  far  held  by  the  alternating 
military  tyrannies  of  opposing  factions  each  de 
lirious  with  the  poison  of  the  one  One-party 
idea. 

During  these  two  years  and  a  half  let  it  be 
made  yet  plainer  than  ever  before,  that  Federal 


1/2    STRUGGLE  FOR  PURE  GOVERNMENT. 

intervention  is  no  willing  choice  of  the  Republi 
can,  or  any  party,  and  that  what  it,  with  the 
whole  nation,  most  covets  for  every  southern 
State  is  as  large,  as  full,  as  universal,  and  as 
prosperous  a  self-government  as  can  be  found  in 
any  part  of  this  Union.  And  then,  in  all  kind 
ness,  for  the  South's  own  sake  as  much  as  for 
the  sake  of  any,  in  the  name  of  the  common 
welfare  and  the  nation's  honor,  let  the  word  be 
spoken,  that  if  by  1892  any  State  in  this  Union 
has  not  at  least  begun,  with  good  show  of  com 
pleting,  the  establishment  of  equal  American 
rights  for  all  Americans,  the  men  of  this  nation 
who,  in  whatever  party,  believe  in  free  govern 
ment  first  will  strain  their  every  nerve  and  sinew 
to  give  the  nation  a  president  and  a  congress 
that  will  establish  it  peaceably,  promptly  and 
forever. 

The  day  in  which  that  is  done,  whether  by 
a  southern  majority's  own  motion  or  by  the 
Government's  intervention,  will  be  a  great  birth 
day.  It  may  date  the  birth  of  some  momen 
tary  and  aimless  strife,  though  this  I  doubt; 
but  it  will  certainly  date  the  birth  of  a  better 
peace,  a  wider,  richer  prosperity,  a  happier 
freedom  of  every  citizen,  and  a  freer,  purer 
government  of  this  Union  and  of  every  State 
in  this  Union,  than  this  continent  has  ever  yet 


STRUGGLE  FOR  PURE  GOVERNMENT.    1/3 

seen.  Yea,  and  complete  fraternity  between 
North  and  South.  For  it  shall  not  have  been 
long  done  ere  the  whole  South  will  rejoice  in 
the  day  of  its  doing  as  now  it  rejoices  in  the  day 
when  Lincoln  freed  the  Negro,  and  in  the  day 
when  Washington  by  spurning  the  offer  of  royal 
rank  and  authority  declared  that  the  only  road 
to  pure  government  is  free  government. 


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